Arnold Zwicky's Blog

While looking up the botanical term nut, I was taken to the page for the NuttyBuddy, a piece of protective athletic gear for men, combining a cup with compression shorts. That’s nut as in nuts ‘testicles’, with nutty a near or full rhyme (depending on your dialect) to buddy. News to me, though I did know about the ice cream cones called Nutty Buddies.

On the protective gear, from the maker’s site:

The NuttyBuddy®: Protecting the Boys

The NuttyBuddy® athletic cup is the most innovative and revolutionary protective cup on the market today. The award-winning, patented athletic supporter provides unprecedented levels of comfort and protection because it is anatomically shaped to the male body. Our safety gear protects the boys while playing baseball, softball, ice hockey, field hockey, lacrosse, football, martial arts, paintball or other contact sports. NuttyBuddy has been featured on ESPN, CNN, MSNBC, & most recently Fox Sports Science.

Think your “boys” can withstand a fastball at blistering speeds? See what happens when the NuttyBuddy® and a pitching machine go head to head, literally! Watch Now!

The components:

More glowing details:

The NuttyBuddy athletic cup is like no other cup ever designed. Our cups are made to the highest quality using a high impact resistant polycarbonate material known as Lexan124-R, which is the same material used in bullet resistant glass and is four times more expensive than the plastic used in traditional cups. The true factor that sets NuttyBuddy apart from our competitors is the anatomically correct design which has made the NuttyBuddy the most comfortable cup on the market today. The design of the cup allows the wearer movement with ease while it cradles the anatomy.

Jockstraps are intended to support, athletic cups to protect, but often the two are combined. (A discussion of jockstrap, the item of clothing, and jockstrap, the word, on my X blog a while back, here, with illustrations.) From the Wikipedia page on jockstraps:

Protective cup

Optional cups offer additional protection for contact sports and are made of hard plastic or steel, perforated for ventilation. A more flexible and comfortable soft cup is also offered for low contact sports. A flex cup variation features a hard exterior melded with a soft lining.

A cup is usually inserted into the pouch of a jockstrap or compression shorts designed to hold a cup. Cups for combat sports (i.e. Mixed Martial Arts, Kick Boxing) have a waistband and straps attached directly to the cup designed to be worn over a regular jockstrap or briefs. An oversized cup and jock combined into a single item which has layered foam padding that protects the groin, kidneys and abdomen is used in boxing and Muay Thai.

A similar piece of protective equipment in the sport of cricket is known as a box…

Cups were required for baseball, football, soccer, rugby, cricket, racquetball, boxing, martial arts and similar sports. Often, coaches or referees would do a “cup check” where either the player knocked on his cup to prove he had one on, or the coach/ref would use a bat or something similar to tap on the cup. No cup, no play, was the rule.

(A note on the phonology of nutty and buddy. For many American speakers, the medial consonant in both words is a voiced flap or tap. For some speakers, the first vowel is somewhat longer in buddy than in nutty, but speakers generally treat the words as rhyming.)

So much for jock undergarments. On to ice cream:

Nutty Buddy is an ice cream cone topped with vanilla ice cream, chocolate ice cream, chocolate and peanuts, manufactured in the United States.

The “Nutty Buddy” was originally created and produced by Seymour Ice Cream Company, which was located in the Port Norfork section of Dorchester, Massachusetts and named after its owner, Buddy Seymourian. Seymour Ice Cream ceased operations in the 1980s. The Nutty Buddy is no longer produced commercially in large numbers across the United States. Its former manufacturer was the Sweetheart Cup Company, which was also the manufacturer of the machines that produced the cones; Sweetheart went out of business in 1998. One of the last manufacturers of the Nutty Buddy is Purity Dairies in Nashville, Tennessee. (link)

Finally, there’s Nutter Butter, another edible:

Nutter Butter is a Nabisco brand peanut-shaped sandwich cookie with a peanut butter filling, which was introduced to the public in 1969.

Nutter Butters originally had a two-ply bread peanut shape with a texture that resembled that of a peanut (resembling an hourglass). The individual cookies were about 3-4 inches in length and had a very recognizable and distinctive look.

Nabisco has recently changed the shape of Nutter Butters to a simple two inch diameter circle cookie. The sudden change has left consumers a bit frustrated. (link)

I recall Nutty Buddies with pleasure, but I don’t think I’ve ever eaten Nutter Butters. And yes, I have worn protective cups (long ago, for football), but just the simple ones inserted in jockstraps, nothing like the NuttyBuddy.

This entry was posted on March 21, 2013 at 5:57 am and is filed under Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Names, Phonology, Underwear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.