Pickles

[Pike]

Pickles are delicious, yes? Do you prefer dill or sweet?

inb4 the inevitable innuendo and jokes

[Jinx]

Wtf sweet pickles are an abomination unto God

[Agent Proto]

Pickles are pretty good. I like it when I get a side of of pickle when I go out to this sandwich shop. :D

[Tigmafuzz]

Pickles are delicious, yes?

Yes :bigsmile: pickles are the best things.

inb4 shorty posts anything in this thread

[Chris]

I seriously and genuinely love pickles. Why people always remove them from their sumptuous McD burgers, is a mystery to me. :G

[Faris]

:nonono:

[Denmark]

Pickles are bad, Pikels

[sharkythesharkdogg]

I hate sweet pickles. I love dill pickles.

[Unbreakable Will]

Sweet pickles are terrible, dill all the way baby.

[Christmas]

12 fun facts in pickled history

People have been eating pickles ever since the Mesopotamians started making them way back in 2400 B.C.E. Here are some even more important things you should know about them.

1. In the Pacific Islands, natives pickle their foods in holes in the ground lined with banana leaves, and use them as food reserves in case of storms. The pickles are so valuable that they've become part of the courting process, helping a man prove he'll be able to provide for a woman. In Fiji, guys can't get a girl without first showing her parents his pickle pits.

2. Cleopatra claimed pickles made her beautiful. (We guess it had more to do with her genes.)

3. The majority of pickle factories in America ferment their pickles in outdoor vats without lids (leaving them subject to insects and bird droppings). But there's a reason. According to food scientists, the sun's direct rays prevent yeast and mold from growing in the brine. Mental Floss: 8 disastrous product names

4. In the Delta region of Mississippi, Kool-Aid pickles have become ridiculously popular with kids. The recipe's simple: take some dill pickles, cut them in half, and then soak them in super strong Kool-Aid for more than a week. According to the New York Times, the sweet vinegar snacks are known to sell out at fairs and delicatessens, and generally go for $.50 to a $1.

5. Not everyone loves a sweet pickle. In America, dill pickles are twice as popular as the sweet variety.

6. The Department of Agriculture estimates that the average American eats 8.5 lbs of pickles a year.

7. When the Philadelphia Eagles thrashed the Dallas Cowboys in sweltering heat in September 2000, many of the players attributed their win to one thing: guzzling down immense quantities of ice-cold pickle juice. Mental Floss: 31 unbelievable high school mascots

8. If it weren't for pickles, Christopher Columbus might never have "discovered" America. In his famous 1492 voyage, Columbus rationed pickles to his sailors to keep them from getting scurvy. He even grew cucumbers during a pit stop in Haiti to restock for the rest of the voyage.

9. Speaking of people who get credit for discovering America, when he wasn't drawing maps and trying to steal Columbus' thunder, Amerigo Vespucci was a well-known pickle-merchant.

10. Napoleon was also a big fan of pickle power. In fact, he put up the equivalent of $250,000 as a prize to whoever could figure out the best way to pickle and preserve foods for his troops.

11. During the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, H. J. Heinz used pick-shaped pins to lure customers to his out of the way booth. By the end of the fair, he'd given out lots of free food, and over 1,000,000 pickle pins.

12. Berrien Springs, Michigan, has dubbed itself the Christmas Pickle Capital of the World. In early December, they host a parade, led by the Grand Dillmeister, who tosses out fresh pickles to parade watchers. Mental Floss: Curious, bizarre and storied state symbols

Pickle is automatically a funny word?

In Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, a play about show business, one of the main characters tells another that certain words are funny all by themselves. “Words with ‘K’ in it are funny. You didn’t know that, did you? If it doesn’t have a ‘K’, it’s not funny.”

He adds, “Pickle is funny.”

Oh, yes, pickle is indeed automatically a funny word in English.

In North America, we almost always use pickle to mean a pickled cucumber. We use pickled as an adjective for anything else that’s been soaked in a flavourful seasoned brine, as in pickled tomatoes or pickled peppers.

North Americans also use pickle as a countable noun: There are three pickles left, meaning, “There are three pickled cucumbers left.” In Britain, pickle alone is an uncountable noun: Do you want some pickle on your fish? They are referring to what North Americans would call a pickle relish, a condiment of chopped vegetables soaked in vinegar and spices.

But there’s more to pickles than eating. As the playwright says, all sorts of unaccounted baggage travels along with a word, such as which words make us giggle and why. What kind of baggage makes pickle unserious?

Partly, when we think of the pickled cucumbers, perhaps we then think of other things similar to pickles and before we know it, we’re blushing. We snicker over pickle because its shape is suggestive of a certain male organ.

Hence, pickle is often used to mean “penis”, as it is in the Hollywood expression pickle shot, meaning a movie scene where a man’s genitals can be seen, and in pickle park, a public but secluded area (like a park) where men meet each other for secret sexual encounters.

Partly, too, we chuckle because as Simon wrote, “pickle” has funny sounds in it. A plosive P (a fast lip-popping noise) and a hard ck. Pickle! You almost want to shout it.

Pickles are common features in my son’s boardbooks (small, short children’s books with very thick pages that are hard to bend or tear) because authors know children know that pickle is fun to say.

Maybe we also giggle because we make odd faces when eating sour pickles, which is where we get pickle-puss, someone who has a sour expression. The lips purse (draw together like the opening of a bag fastened with string), the eyebrows scowl, the whole face scrunches up (squeezes together in an irregular way), just as if we have eaten a very sour pickle.

Because of the automatically funny notions about pickle — look, I’m serious, just ask anybody who speaks English for a living and they’ll tell you, pickle is a giggle-maker — the word pops up in all sorts of slangy language.

For example, pickle is used for things (besides male genitals) that are pickle-like. Bombs and torpedoes are long and smooth and round, so soldiers, airmen, and sailors call them pickles.

By extension, to drop bombs or to push the button to drop them is to pickle. Even getting a target in the crosshairs can be to pickle and the switch or lever which fires or drops the weapons (or controls other machinery) is sometimes called the pickle or pickle switch. The switch is sometimes shaped like a pickle.

To be in a pickle is a far more commonly known expression. It means to be in a difficult situation. If you’re locked out of your house at night with no way to get in, you’re in a pickle. If your wife is the person who locked you out of the house because you were having an affair with another woman, then you’re really in a pickle.

More obscurely, to hit a ball hard in baseball is to pickle it. The idea here, supposedly, is that the batter is salting away the ball. Ordinarily, when you salt something away, you store it away for a long time. This is often said of food, since salt has been used since the earliest days of civilisation to keep food from spoiling. Salting something is like pickling it. So, metaphorically speaking, the ball is hit so hard that it won’t be seen for a long, long time, as if it were a fruit that was salted, or pickled, and stored.

Pickle-stabbers is what you might call a woman’s high-heeled shoes, especially those with spindly, sharp heels. They look very much like the kind of utensil needed to successfully stab and retrieve pickles from a jar.

In aviation, to pickle an aircraft is to disassemble it, usually for storage or shipping, and packing all of its parts in oil or grease.

In fact, putting anything in any kind of liquid can be called pickling, including pickling your liver, which means drinking too much alcohol over a long period of time, although to be pickled can simply mean to be thoroughly drunk.

You can also pickle metal, which means immersing it in an acidic solution, usually as part of an industrial process.

In Britain, pickle can be a term of affection: “Come sit by your papa, my little pickle.”

So besides funny or sour, pickle is a little sweet, too.


37386

[Tigmafuzz]

I love you Christmas.

[Shorty]

The worst.

[drotato]

Penguin.... PIKEEEEELS.


37387

[Shorty]

oh my god if this is about metalocalypse pickles I am so down

[drotato]

oh my god if this is about metalocalypse pickles I am so down
Everyone should have known he would come into play here. (:<

[Beowulf]

Pickles are awesome. Christmas, that was the best post ever. XD

[~*~Celes~*~]

I love sweet pickles. Dill pickles are good to, though. At the moment I can't eat any, they give me indigestion -_-

[Madame Adequate]

Gherkins are great :)

[Bunny]

I seriously and genuinely love pickles. Why people always remove them from their sumptuous McD burgers, is a mystery to me. :G

Everything produced and used by McDonald's is disgusting and you should feel bad for even mentioning it.

Pickles are okay. Pepperoncinis are better.

[I Took the Red Pill]

Dill pickles are wonderful. I truly do not understand how someone can enjoy sweet pickles. Every time I bite into one, thinking it's a dill pickle, I launch into a murderous rage (well not really, it's more like "Ah wtf, why is this a sweet pickle." Then I am ok. But everyone likes a good bit of hyperbole).

[Pike]

I actually don't mind sweet pickles even though dill pickles are obviously better.


Gherkins are great :)

Yer a wee blurt.

[Raistlin]

I have to side with Shorty on this one.

Now I feel dirty.

[Clo]

I don't like pickles.

JUDGE ME.

[Quindiana Jones]

I was in this massive city once, can't remember its name, and I tried these really strong pickles, can't remember their name, and they knocked me on my ass. Really tasty, though, so I decided to buy a huge sack of them and take them back to my home town. :D

[Rantz]

I hid in a sack of pickles once.

[NorthernChaosGod]

I don't like pickles.

JUDGE ME.

I really dislike pickles.

[Shorty]

I have to side with Shorty on this one.

Now I feel dirty.

Come to the dark side where we hate everything.

[Unbreakable Will]

I seriously and genuinely love pickles. Why people always remove them from their sumptuous McD burgers, is a mystery to me. :G

Everything produced and used by McDonald's is disgusting and you should feel bad for even mentioning it.

Pickles are okay. Pepperoncinis are better.
I...I agree with Bunny.

Damn that was hard to say.

[theundeadhero]

Bread and butter pickles. Sammich sliced.

[Hollycat]

I love pickles. You can eat them all day long and they never get bland!