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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).

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