Q.
Hurray, it’s the Summer Olympics! Time for some ultra high-pressure sports.

It’s remarkable that so many athletes manage to remain ‘cool as cucumbers’, even when all those years of training come to a head in just a few minutes – or even seconds – of intense scrutiny and competition.

How did this cucumber expression come to be?

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A.

The ‘cool as a cucumber’ person is composed, calm, able to deflect pressures, sports and otherwise. It’s a description that is said to go back to as early as the 1500s.

Anyone who has set out to build a DIY Home Spa knows that step #3 is: slice some cucumbers to lay gently on the closed eyes of all attendees. Why? Because cucumbers feel cool. After all – according to UCLA Health –  cucumbers are 96% water.

Physician and botanist Nicholas Culpeper went all in on the cooling properties of the cucumber. In his 1653 Complete Herbal, he wrote: ‘Cucumbers cool the stomach.’ ‘They are so much cried out against for their coldness, if they were but one degree colder they would be poison.’  

Cucumbers, Culpeper continued, are ‘excellently good for a hot stomach, and a hot liver.’

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As ever for old sayings, other explanations abound.  Walsh, Walsh, and Garrison offer another theory in their 1888 ‘American Notes and Queries.’ ‘Cool as a cucumber’ they say, is rooted in the greenhouse practices of rich Brits whose cucumbers are ‘cultivated under glass.’

In his 1700s poem ‘A New Song Of New Similes,’  British poet John Gay includes:

… Pert as a pear-monger I’d be,
If Molly were but kind;
Cool as a cucumber could see
The rest of womankind …

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So, you go Olympic athletes with your cucumber cool. 🥒🧊 The expression does seem more 5 rings-suited than ‘cool as custard’ – another simile thrown about in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds.

www.justcurious.ca

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