wooden nutmeg

plural wooden nutmegs

1. Synonym of wooden nickel (“a worthless item intended to appear like another of value”).

   These predictions would probably all have been verified had it not been for the fact that Mr. Fall is one of those live Yankees who is always ready to whittle out a wooden nutmeg while waiting for his horse to gain wind when stuck in the mud.

   1898, William James McKnight, A Pioneer History of Jefferson County, Pennsylvania: And My First Recollections of Brookville, Pennsylvania, 1840-1843, page 628

   3 more examples

   These were nearly all Yankees, regarded by the Southern people as a trafficking, tricky set, ready to sell a wooden nutmeg or any other sham. They, in turn, looked on the Kentuckians as a lazy, shiftless class, subsisting on hog, hominy and corn-bread, and willing tools in their hands.

   1879, William Henry Perrin, Albert Adams Graham, D. M. Blair, editors, The History of Coles County, Illinois, page 343

   But every child in the union knows that the most famous products of Connecticut are Yankee notions, nutmegs made of wood and clocks that won't go. Now, your Civil Service Reform is just such another Yankee notion; it's a wooden nutmeg; it's a clock with a show case and sham works. And you know it!

   1880, [Henry Brooks Adams], chapter III, in Democracy: An American Novel (Leisure-hour Series; no. 112), New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, →OCLC, pages 61–62

   The assumption in the public mind was that anyone who bought a wooden nutmeg was a fool who should have known better than to fall for a trick. But because the real as a cultural value is no longer being privileged over the artificial, this simple assumption about simulacra has now become a sort of ontological fossil

   2001, Steven Carter, Leopards in the Temple: Selected Essays, 1990-2000, page 101

   Synonyms: wooden nickel