nail the jelly to the wall (2025)

Hello everyone,
Please could you tell me what this phrase means? I have found this sentence in an article from The Economist, and I am at a loss to know what it means: that he fails to find a solution to the problem at stake?

Alas, leadership is a slippery subject, and as he rehearses the pros and cons of various theories, even Mr Nye never quite nails the jelly to the wall.

Thanks for your help.

Never quite succeeds. Or never quite gets there. "Succeed" might not sound appropriate in the particular context quoted, since he is tossing theories around in his head. In this case, maybe "never quite reaches a conclusion" would be more accurate. It has the same general intent.

You try doing it (nailing some jelly to a wall I mean) and you'll see....!

Hmmm... I'll try.

Jelly is soft, slippery and amorphous. If you try to grab a handful of jelly, most of it will squish out between your fingers. If you try to nail a handful of jelly to the wall, you'll soon discover that you can't. There isn't anything solid there for the nail to get hold of.

The author seems to be saying that leadership is as amorphous and hard to get of as jelly, at least for Mr. Nye.

It's difficult to understand fully without a bit more context, but it seems to me that the author is deliberately mixing up metaphors, possibly in imitation of Mr Nye or his theories. My first impressions are that even Mr Nye never quite manages to get everything right/understood, because 'leadership' involves so much use and misuse of oratory devices.

Perhaps it might be more helpful if we started a list of the metaphors and idioms which could be referenced:
To nail something/someone - To trap it
To nail one's colours to the mast - Comes from the idea of nailing one's flag to the mast of the ship so that the enemy can't easily take it down. It means to stick determinedly to ones ideas (I nearly said guns there; Explaining idioms with idioms)
To hit the nail on the head - To get something right or spot on (instead of knocking the nail sideways or denting the surrounding wood instead).
Walls - lots of idioms about walls
Jelly - has different meanings in BE and AE, which makes its tricky to decipher since I don't know if the journalist is BE or AE.
EDIT: looks like the economist is BE, so a Jelly is a wobbly amusing thing. Difficult to nail to a wall unless you add to much gelatine.

cuchuflete said:

Nailing jelly to a wall is no more difficult than herding cats. And no more possible.

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From this, I take it herding cats is possible, since, given a reasonable gelatine content, nailing jelly to a wall is possible.

Jelly, nailed to a wall.

I first heard this phrase as a title of a computing book from 1981: "Nailing Jelly to a Tree" by Jerry Willis and William Danley. The writer of this article believes there to be good evidence that Jerry Willis was the author of the phrase.

I presume that the "jelly" is the preserve that traditionally goes with peanut butter, rather than "Jello". But either works.

Matching Mole said:

I presume that the "jelly" is the preserve that traditionally goes with peanut butter, rather than "Jello". But either works.

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It must be an American expression. I've never heard of "nailing jam to a wall" in BE!

Matching Mole said:

I first heard this phrase as a title of a computing book from 1981: "Nailing Jelly to a Tree" by Jerry Willis and William Danley. The writer of this article believes there to be good evidence that Jerry Willis was the author of the phrase.

Click to expand...

The phrase appears in a book published in 1921.

"You could no more deal with the Columbian rulers" [President Teddy Roosevelt] exclaimed, "than you could nail jelly to a wall." (Charles and Mary Beard History of the United States )

If the quote is accurate, this was before Panama revolted from Columbia 1903, which puts the date even further back.