Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one version of a thing becomes the default. For example, in a thousand years, food historians might not necessarily know that a recipe calling for two eggs assumes the use of eggs from chickens rather than any other bird. Similar shifts occurred with corn (once any grain, now specifically referring to maize in North America), meat (once any food, now the flesh of an animal), and marmalade (once exclusively made from quince). This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Are Pickled Cucumbers Called Plain Old “Pickles” When Other Things Are Pickled, Too?”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, this is Jill calling from Greenville, South Carolina.
Hey Jill.
We’re glad to have you.
Today I’m calling to talk to you about pickles.
Oh yes, please.
I love pickles.
Me too.
Pickles.
Okay.
What are you thinking about in terms of pickles?
Well I am curious as why why is it that when we say pickles, everyone just automatically assumes pickled cucumbers.
So if you ask someone if they want pickles on their sandwich, like you just did, it’s implied that you’re talking about pickled cucumbers.
But for other pickled foods you always have to specify like pickled onions, pickled carrots and so on.
I’m just curious if there’s like a linguistic reason as to why cucumbers became the default pickle.
And if there are other examples like this where one specific food becomes like the unspoken standard, I was thinking like the closest I could think of is fries, which we’re implying is fried potatoes, when anything else has to be spelled out like fried fish or for example fried pickles.
So I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Yeah, Jill, amazing.
This is great because there’s a ton of cool stuff we can talk about here.
And a lot of it has to do with food.
There’s a word that we keep bringing up on the show these days, and it’s prototypicality.
It’s the idea that something is prototypical, and that when you mention it, there’s one particular prototype of this kind of thing that pops into your mind.
There’s a kind of a generic idea that you may have.
Now it can differ from person to person, but generally these are culturally shared.
They’re because we’re all come from the same basic culture.
So for example, something has floated for years in the historian community is the idea that in a thousand years, if they’re looking at our cookbooks and somebody reads, oh, it the recipe needs two eggs.
In a thousand years, they might not know that we meant chicken eggs.
And they’d be like, well, what do they want?
Hummingbirds, emus?
I don’t I don’t know what kind of eggs they want in this recipe.
That’s because for us, the prototypical egg is a chicken egg.
And and we find this again and again, corn is a really great example because corn is a historical example.
It used to refer to any grain seed, but now, at least in the United States and North America, we generally mean maize, M-A-I-Z-E.
Whereas you have this other idea, which is so for us, corn is prototypically maize, but for other people it isn’t.
Meat went the same route.
It used to mean just general food, anything that you would put on the table and eat.
And then it became prototypically the flesh of an animal.
If I say, do you want to go for a drink?
What do you assume?
Alcohol, yeah.
Alcohol, yeah, you don’t we’re not going to get warm milk, probably.
You know, unless one of us is under under drinking age.
So again and again we find with food that this happens it happened with the word plum.
Plum historically meant dried grapes.
And we marmalade wasn’t always made from oranges.
It was made from quince.
And so the prototypicality of that changed.
So many good examples.
That’s awesome.
So yeah, there’s a ton of these.
So anyway, yeah, so just generally what happens is we develop a cultural understanding that we agree upon generally, and there are obviously exceptions to this, where but generally we culturally agree that this one generic version of this category is what we all agree we mean when we say something like pickled.
Yeah, it does seem weird if you think about it, like why did cucumbers win?
You know?
Yeah.
But it’s just so many cucumbers in the world.
So Jill, does that help?
Yes, that completely answered my question.
More than answered my question.
Thank you so much.
Always in full.
Always too much.
Thank you for saying that.
No, I love I love all that information.
That was awesome.
Thank you so much.
I’m gonna go tell all my friends about this.
Yes, please.
And and look up the word prototypicality for more.
I will.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate you too.
Sure.
We appreciate you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Take care.
Take care.
Yep.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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