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The numbers are slowly climbing, but with only two months left in the year, I’m facing a bit of an uphill battle to achieve one of the goals I set for this year.
I had hoped to have expanded my collection of toy soldiers to 10,000 figures in time to celebrate 2010, and with well over 9,000 already done at the start of the year, that wasn’t an unrealistic goal.
Up until a few weeks ago, I was doing well enough. But then I hit a bit of a wall. I’m currently at 9,852, and with only 148 to go and two months still remaining, the target isn’t out of reach.
But if I don’t make some significant progress over the next couple of weeks, then I will definitely be “in a pickle.”
I’m not sure if this is a phrase Americans are familiar with, and the sources showing the use of the phrase listed on the “Phrase A Week” Web site are all either English or European, so I assume it’s not that common here.
The meaning is, of course, to be in a quandary or some other difficult position.
The earliest pickles were apparently spicy sauces made to accompany meat dishes. Later, in the 16th century, the name pickle was also given to a mixture of spiced, salted vinegar that was used as a preservative. The word comes from the Dutch or Low German “pekel,” with the meaning of “something piquant.”
Later still, in the 17th century, the vegetables that were preserved, for example cucumbers and gherkins, also came to be called pickles.
The “in trouble” meaning of “in a pickle” was an allusion to being as disoriented and mixed up as the stewed vegetables that made up pickles.
This was partway to being a literal allusion, as fanciful stories of the day related to hapless people who found themselves on the menu. The earliest known use of pickle in English contains such an citation. The “Morte Arthure,” dating to circa 1440, relates the gory imagined ingredients of King Arthur’s diet:
“He soupes all this sesoun with seuen knaue childre, Choppid in a chargour of chalke-whytt syluer, With pekill & powdyre of precious spycez.”
(Which supposedly translates into modern English as “He dines all season on seven rascal children, chopped, in a bowl of white silver, with pickle and precious spices.”)
Hmm!
I thought King Arthur was supposed to be a “good guy.” I would have thought that eating children was more to his nephew Mordred’s appetite?
The figurative version of the phrase, meaning simply “in a fix” or, in the almost identical 19th century phrase “in a stew,” arrives during the next century. Thomas Tusser’s “Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie,” written in 1573,” contains this useful advice:
“Reape barlie with sickle, that lies in ill pickle.”
Presumably, barley that wasn’t in ill pickle, (in other words, the corn that was standing up straight), would be cut with the larger and more efficient scythe.
There are a few references to ill pickles and this pickle in print in the late 16th century, and Shakespeare was one of the first to use “in a pickle,” in “The Tempest,” written around 1611, when the character Trinculo states:
“I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last that, I fear me, will never out of my bones: I shall not fear fly-blowing.”
A return to the more literal interpretation of the phrase came about in the late 1700s. The Duke of Rutland had toured Britain and wrote up his experiences in a travelogue entitled “Journal of a Tour to the Northern Parts of Great Britain,” written in 1796.
He was present at the disinterment of the 350 year-old body of Thomas Beaufort, which he claimed to have been pickled and “as perfect as when living”:
“The corpse was done up in a pickle, and the face wrapped up in a sear cloth.”
Just nine years later the most celebrated personage ever to have been literally in a pickle - Admiral Horatio Nelson - met his end, although some might argue that, being preserved in brandy, he found himself in more of a liquor than a pickle.
Nelson, of course, came unstuck at the Battle of Trafalgar on Oct. 21, 1805, fought between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French Navy and Spanish Navy, during the War of the Third Coalition (August to December, 1805) of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).
The battle was the most decisive British naval victory of the war. With 27 ships of the line led by Admiral Lord Nelson aboard HMS Victory, the British defeated 33 French and Spanish ships of the line under French Admiral Pierre Villeneuve off the south-west coast of Spain, just west of Cape Trafalgar.
The Franco-Spanish fleet lost 22 ships, without a single British vessel being lost.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who had just sold the Louisiana territories to the United States two years previously (“The Louisiana Purchase”) to fund his wars in Europe can’t possibly have been amused by the naval defeat.
On completion of the purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, Bonaparte is reputed to have predicted:
“This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.”
Not soon enough though, to get Bonaparte out of his European pickle!
by FRANK SHANLY
frank@news-banner.com
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