What Is The Origin Of (148)?…
Cucumber time
Every now and again I come across a phrase which is now redundant, at least in English, but which is so evocative that it deserves to make a comeback. A case in point is this week’s phrase, cucumber time, which was used to denote that flat time of the year when nothing much happens. These days we call it the silly season when newspapers are full of stories like man bites dog or nothing much happened today or what the Americans call a slow news season. But why cucumbers?
It first made its appearance in print in the ever useful A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, published in 1700. In its august pages cucumber time is defined as “taylers holiday when they have leave to play and cucumbers are in season.” We can deduce that it was already in use in the 17th century, at least among the lower sorts whose colourful language would make its way into a lexicon. A reference in Notes and Queries from 1853 shone some further light on the phrase; “this term…the working tailors of England use to denote that which their masters call the flat season.”
Further explanation of the term was provided by the Pall Mall Gazette of 1867 which noted that “Tailors could not be expected to earn much money in cucumber season.” The reason cited for the downturn in the tailors’ earning power was that “when the cucumbers are in, the gentry are out of town.” With the toffs out enjoying a summer retreat in the country, there was no one around to order a new set of togs. The tailors were idle.
What is particularly interesting is that the phrase cucumber time or season (and in some cases the pickled version of a cucumber, the gherkin) appears in a number of European languages, all meaning the flat part of the year. In Dutch we have komkommertijd, in German sauregurkenzeit ,in Norwegian agurktid in Czech Okurková sezóna and in Polish Sezon ogórkowy to name just a few. Perhaps, tellingly, there is a similar phrase in Hebrew, Onat Ha’melafefonim. Given the dominance that Jews had in the clothing trade and their diaspora, often enforced, throughout Europe, is it fanciful to suppose that the Hebrew phrase is the source of the phrase?
Tailors became known as cucumbers, giving further credence to the widespread adoption of our phrase and its association with the peaks and troughs of their workload. An illustration by Thomas Rowlandson, published in 1823, entitled Hot Goose, Cabbages and Cucumbers, makes the point. In the vernacular of tailoring, cabbage was a term used to describe the off cuts of cloth from an order. As they had already been paid for, the tailor could use them to make other garments – an added bonus. Cabbage also became a term for tailors and/or money and gave rise to a playful maxim that “tailors are Vegetarians, because they live on ‘cucumber’ when without work, and on ‘cabbage’ when in full employ.” In case you were wondering, the goose referred to in Rowlandson’s picture is an iron.
It was around the 1860s and down to an unnamed writer for the Saturday Review that the term silly season was born, to describe, ostensibly, that time of the year when Parliament and the courts were in recess and when newspapers had little or nothing with which to fill up their pages. It is a shame that that phrase stuck. It is high time we restored cucumber time to its rightful place in our language or am I just being silly?
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, cabbage as a tailor's term, Hot Goose Cabbages and Cucumbers, komkommertijd, origin of cucumber time, Pall Mall Gazette, sauregurkenzeit, silly season, slow news period, tailors as cucumbers, Thomas Rowlandson
