Cold as cowcumbers
Posted by ESC on October 23, 2003
In Reply to: Cool as a cucumber posted by ESC on October 23, 2003
: : Hi! I know what this means, but where does it come from? Thank you!
: : Saxon
: It's pretty straight forward. A sliced cucumber is cool.
COOL AS A CUCUMBER - "Unruffled; serene. The cucumber, like the watermelon, is served in the summer as a symbol of coolness and thus as an antidote to the heat. In its function as a simile it first symbolized coldness or aloofness. The first act of 'Cupid's Revenge,' by Beaumont and Fletcher , has the line: 'Young Maids were as cold as Cowcumbers.' The modern sense is clear in Thomas de Quincey's discussion of the ancient historian Thucydides, who, he says, 'is cool as a cucumber on every act of atrocity.'" From The Dictionary of Cliches by James Rogers (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985).