Do pregnant women enjoy pickles and ice cream? Linguists from the American Dialect Society have been discussing this recently. They found that the expression pickles and ice cream once referred simply to the conjoining of two unrelated things, sort of the opposite of peas and carrots. Not until the middle of the 20th century did it pertain to cravings, simply because pregnant women go through different nutritional patterns than they would when eating for one. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Opposite of “Peas and Carrots””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, how are you?
Doing well. Who’s this?
This is Mary calling from San Diego.
Hi, Mary.
Hi, Mary. How are you doing?
Good. How are you?
Super duper. What can we help you with today?
Well, I am about six months pregnant, expecting my second child.
Oh, congratulations. Babies are good.
Thank you.
And I must have seen this somewhere, or someone said it to me, but I found myself thinking about that old saying that pregnant women always crave pickles and ice cream.
And I thought that was really strange because that’s never been true for me, and I don’t really know anyone for whom that has been true.
So I tried looking it up, but it’s so common I didn’t have much luck.
So I was wondering if you had any insight on that.
What do you crave?
Well, you know, I’ve heard also that if you’re carrying a boy, you’re supposed to crave salty food, and if you’re carrying a girl, you’re supposed to crave sweet food.
So I have found that to be true for me, but I don’t know if that’s more of me knowing the saying and it becomes true.
Right.
I think it’s more of a folk tale, but it’s a fun one, right?
Yeah, right.
I can crave chocolate right now.
And how do you satisfy that craving?
Mostly Ben and Jerry’s.
Oh, I thought maybe it was just like big squirts right out of the Hershey syrup bottle.
She goes into the soda fountain and just puts her head under the tap.
Get the chocolate syrup right from the source.
Ben and Jerry and a spoon.
I’ll tell you, they were discussing this question about pickles and ice cream on the email list of the American Dialect Society earlier this year.
The American Dialect Society is an organization that studies language, mainly English, in North America.
I’m a member and have been an officer of the society for a long time.
And what they found is really interesting.
The pickles and ice cream related to pregnancy is a thing that a woman craves goes back to the 1940s easily.
And prior to that, pickles and ice cream was used in a wide variety of contexts just to refer to two very different things.
Like you might say, Martha and Grant get along like pickles and ice cream.
It’s kind of like water and oil, right?
Because that’s another idiom that might say.
What’s that?
Like the opposite of peas and carrots.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly like that.
Or the opposite of like peanut butter and jelly.
Pickles and ice cream is like, who wants that?
Yeah, right.
Nobody.
That’s interesting.
Past the Pepto-Bismol.
And so you’ll find pickles and ice cream being used in reverse order, ice cream and pickles, in a lot of different contexts and a lot of different sources for more than 100 years.
But it wasn’t until the mid part of the last century that it really solidified as this stereotypical thing that kind of represented all the different cravings that a woman could have.
And it wasn’t meant to imply that there was some kind of statistical evidence that said that women crave pickles and ice cream a lot.
It just meant that, you know, they have these weird tastes.
Yeah, that you wouldn’t normally eat.
Yeah, a little kind of unreasonableness.
And they want them at weird times.
That don’t make sense.
Yeah, they want them at weird times and not as part of their normal meal.
And really, scientifically, it’s been shown that women have these cravings because their body knows that they need a nutrient.
And there’s a really kind of inefficient system for the body telling the brain to go get the right thing.
The message is somehow garbled sometimes, and the woman goes to get a thing that doesn’t have that nutrient in it at all.
Well, it would be interesting to know if there are women out there who are pregnant or have been and specifically crave pickles and ice cream.
Being pregnant does give me the excuse to eat all the Ben and Jerry’s I want.
Well, Mary, we wish you the best of luck with the baby when little Grant is born.
Will you give us a call?
Sure.
Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Bye-bye.
What are your questions about words and language and food?
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