I’m mightily relieved that we’ve finally hauled ourselves out of those slack summer doldrums into refreshing, pencil-sharpening September.
August is often referred to in the UK as “the silly season” when the everyone who matters is on holiday, the papers have nothing sensible to report, and thus their pages get filled with… er … filler, often of a rather mischievous kind. Much to my delight, the esteemed lexicographer Michael Quinion of World Wide Words had a brilliant entry referencing this time of year and other unusual terms used to describe it.
“Cucumber-time” is one that was widely used across Europe. It seems to derive from the tailor’s trade, being a term for the flat late-summer season when work was thin on the ground. Then a tailor would have to subsist on the cucumbers developing plentifully and tumescently in his garden. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, dated 1700: “Cucumbers, Taylers. Cucumber-time, Taylers Holiday, when they have to leave Play, and Cucumbers are in season.” As the Pall Mall Gazette explained in 1867: “Tailors could not be expected to earn much money ‘in cucumber season.’ Because when cucumbers are in, the gentry are out of town.”
In the wonderful sideways shift of word-development, tailors began thereafter to be known slangily as “cucumbers”, but I’d recommend you not try it out in Saville Row until your bespoke suit is already hanging safely in your closet.
Another revelation to me was the term “cabbages”: a word used to describe the waste scraps left over from cutting out clothes. The tailor could claim these as his own. As a correspondent to Notes & Queries helpfully explained on 5th November 1853: “Tailors are vegetarians, who ‘live on cucumber’ while at play, and on ‘cabbage’ while at work.” By all accounts, the term is still current in the clothing trade.
I’ve had a lovely summer, with not a few cucumbers (more of that later), but am still mightily relieved to be getting back to my cabbages. Hope you’re enjoying getting back into the swing of things too.
Not proper "cabbage" but a thrifted cabbage-coloured knitted garment, awaiting felting and upscaling
ha! i had totally forgotten about cabbage. I did know that once, but cucumbers are a totally new thing. thanks for these treasures. Going to tell people I stuff draught excluders with cabbages from now on and see what funny looks it gets me
Ooh, and I've also just discovered that "cabbage", in another linguistic slide, also became slang for a tailor in the late seventeenth century (source: my trusty old Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). It had been used to describe the off-cut pieces of cloth, appropriated by the tailor, from the mid-seventeenth.