How to Leave Your Lover with Lemons

This Valentine’s Day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang.

Postcard, originally mailed in Michigan on February 13, 1909

Back when my husband was my boyfriend, he mentioned an antique postcard that he’d picked up and mailed to his parents. On it, a man’s outreached hands held green and yellow oviform fruits; the type read “A Lime and a Lemon With My Compliments.” Andy didn’t quite understand the card, he told me, but it had amused him, and he wondered what had become of it.

That was early in our relationship. I was eager to be lovable. Shopping eBay for another copy for him, I scored two, both showing a crateful of citrus. “This Box of Oranges, with my Compliments, from Florida,” went one; “This Box of Grape-Fruit With My Compliments From Florida,” went the other. I’m from Florida, so the postcards were on-target, and next visit home I sent them out to desired effect. Vitamin C protects the body against scurvy—that was the meaning in my mind. You offered lemons to people you approved of to keep them prime.

Neither of us yet knew the true meaning behind the phrase “handed a lemon.”

Recently, I bought Andy a manual citrus press, and went back online to find a vintage postcard to accompany the present. That’s where it all began.

 

There was a black-and-white photograph from 1908, in which a lady dropped the fruit into the palms of a gentleman down on bended knee: “A LEMON FOR YOU.” Another, from the same era, shows a teddy bear in a top hat clutching a lemon—a look of shock on his mug—while a teddy bear in a skirt made her exit under a parasol: “Well! Well! You never can tell.” A card made of leather (yes) suggested “This