Right from the morning when you switched off your alarm clock in your sleep, and missed your school bus, to when you and you sister are locked out because you left your house key in your desk in school, everything has been going wrong for you. And you are in no mood to explain all of it to your sister, who asks, “What actually went wrong?”
You tell her, “In a nutshell, everything!”
Quite an understandable situation…
Make it brief
The phrase, in a nutshell , means in short , to summarise , in brief . You can use it when you want to tell someone a shorter version of a longer story or you want to summarise a description.
If you have just seen a movie which you didn’t like, for lots of reasons, then you could just sum up all your opinions in a few words and say, “ In a nutshell , the movie was just horrible.”
So, next time your friend starts pouring out a story that you aren’t much interested in, you could politely ask her, “Can you tell me in a nutshell ?”
