DCML digest, Vol 1 #995 - 10 msgs

Sue and Gary Leach bangfish at cableone.net
Wed Jul 3 01:00:34 CEST 2002


Rob:

For Gary:  Don't the Americans refer to the small "pickling" cucumbers as
gherkins?

Americans don't really use "gherkin" much. As I mentioned, in grocery stores
the small raw cucumbers suitable for pickling are labelled "pickling
cucumbers" (the adjective referring to that suitability, rather than the
state of actually being pickled). Where the term "gherkins" is used at all,
it's almost always referring to a cuke much smaller than the normal pickling
variety (and usually used for what we call "sweet pickles").

- and the large cucumbers as "salad cucumbers"

Grocery stores normally label the big cucumbers as just "cucumbers", or
sometimes "large cucumbers". I use the term "salad" to describe their main
purpose in life.

As you can tell, I speak as a shopper (and hobbyist gardener), not a farmer.
That's why I only speculate that American farmers might bandy the term
"pickle crop" in normal conversation, and that if so, Barks might have been
acquainted with it. In any event, for his audience, the term "pickle crop"
served Barks' purposes much better than "gherkin crop"  or "cucumber crop",
as it got right to the point - which is generally why people use such terms
in real life.

A large number of Americans did (and probably still do) refer to cucumbers
as pickles.

I'd have to say that any American who told another American to go to the
produce section and grab a couple of pickles would get a very funny look, at
the very least. And going to the shelves to pick up a jar of cucumbers just
doesn't happen. We just don't connect the cucumber to the pickle all that
readily. Truth be told, we generally see then as entirely separate foods.
 
I, myself, have been guilty of such in a very telling (and ironic) way. I am
Jewish, yet, at 
times, (after spending much time in USA) when angry or startled, I find
myself 
saying "Jesus Christ!". This is DEFINATELY something I would not want to say
        (for various reasons).

And that's because you're using the term in the manner in which you have
heard it used, as an expostulation. In that circumstance, whatever your
religious heritage, its literal meaning is all but irrelevant.

Gary 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://nafsk.se/pipermail/dcml/attachments/20020703/1f8e51fc/attachment.html


More information about the DCML mailing list