This is obvious. Circus peanuts don’t have nuts, legumes or anything else that resembles a nut.
They’re a metaphor. Or perhaps a simile, it depends on your level of pedantry.
And yet, many people have a hard time with metaphor. Metaphor, not memorization, is the heart of learning.
If you understand A, and you see that B is like A but a little different, now you understand B.
Memorization is brittle. Metaphor scales.
Metaphor helps us create the next thing and find our footing when confronted when the new.
I believe that understanding metaphor is a skill. We can get better at it.
Find some circus peanuts you don’t understand and decode them.