A caller in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, says that when his grandfather was asked how he was doing, he’d reply, “running like a pickle seeder,” meaning “doing really well.” The joke, of course, is that there’s no such thing as a pickle seeder. After all, what would be the point of taking seeds out of pickles? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Running Like a Pickle Seeder”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Felipe from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Wow!
Welcome!
What are you doing there?
I’m actually working with a Christian mission here.
Oh, that’s awesome.
That’s amazing.
Thanks. Well, I’m originally from Indiana.
Okay.
And growing up, I heard my grandpa always use this phrase over and over again when people would ask him how he was doing or how his tractor was running, how his car was running.
He’d always say, running like a pickle cedar.
And I have since used that phrase over and over again until someone finally questioned me, what is a pickle seeder and how does it run?
And I didn’t have an answer.
Oops.
Any guesses?
Well, I figured that a pickle has really small seeds.
And so if a machine could sort the seeds of a pickle, perhaps it was running very well.
But I don’t really know.
Every time he used the phrase, it meant that everything was running perfectly.
I think this one goes back to the jokes about machines that don’t exist.
Because why do you need to seed a pickle?
Why do you need to take the seeds out of a pickle at all?
You can’t do anything with them, right?
They won’t sprout.
This is true.
And there’s another whole joke in the farming business where you get the newbie, the rube, who comes in from the city and wants to work on the land for a while.
You give them a bag of seeds and tell them that are pickle seeds.
And just wait a little bit and the pickles will come up.
Of course, there’s no such thing as pickle seeds.
You can’t plant pickles, right?
And the rube doesn’t know that.
So I think what you’ve got here is a multi-layered joke where it’s running as fast as a pickle seeder because there’s no such thing.
So it runs as perfect as your imagination will allow.
Very good.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
I like the phrase, though.
Our pleasure.
I wonder what the equivalent is in Spanish.
Have you run into that?
I have not run into that in Spanish yet, no.
Dude, you’ve got to keep your ears open for us.
Send us some cool stuff that you learned in Honduras, all right?
I will do.
Will do.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for the favor.
Bye-bye.
Ciao.
Ciao.
Purring like a kitten.
That’s another one, right?
There’s a bunch of those.
But most of them aren’t as jocular as that one.
There’s a lot of the discussion about pickle cedar online is people asking Felipe’s question.
What’s a pickle cedar?
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
I just love the idea of the farm always going giggling at all the city folk not knowing what a pickle cedar is.
That’s good, right?
Absolutely.
It’s great.
