Another sprig from the luxuriant linguistic hothouse that is Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (The Light and the Dark; cf. this post): at one point he uses the Russian phrase По кочану, literally ‘by the head (of cabbage)’ but in practice a snarky rhyming response to the question Почему? ‘Why?’ and thus comparable to the English snarky-but-banal “Because.” I wondered how Bromfield had rendered it, so I checked and discovered he had “The answer’s a lemon,” which made no sense to me. Well, it turns out that’s a UK sort-of-equivalent; Eric Partridge has a listing in his invaluable though unreliable A Dictionary of Catch Phrases:
answer is a lemon—the; also the answer’s a lemon. A derisive reply to a query—or a request—needing a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ but hoping for ‘yes’; a ‘sarcastic remark—acidic in its conclusion’, as Noble aptly calls it; orig. (c 1910) US […]
But his evidence for its US origin is (as so often) extremely dubious, so I turn to the Varied Reader: are you familiar with this tart phrase, and do you know anything about its history?
are you familiar with this tart phrase
Yes, I [BrE] recognise the phrase. It’s a long time since I’ve heard it/I’d say my parents or grandparents generation. The Free Dictionary says “old-fashioned … primarily heard in the UK”.
Not to be confused (as AI Summary seems to) with ‘this car is a lemon’ — meaning it’s defective/a bad purchase.
Yes, Partridge exhibits that same confusion.
Yes, I’m familiar with it too. I hadn’t really thought of it as old-fashioned, but I suppose it’s true that the Young People of Today don’t say it.
“This fanfic is a lemon.”
Unlike David E and AntC, I’ve never heard it — and I think I am in the same ballpark, agewise.
Never heard of it.
Green’s doesn’t seem to have it although of course it’s not at all far from the general “something undesirable or disappointing” sense that underlies various of the specific uses documented therein. And now at least I have learned of “Lemon Avenue (n.) (also Lemon Land) [their lips are eternally pursed with disapproval, as if they had just sucked a lemon] (Aus.) the fig. name for the ‘spiritual home’ of censorious or socially repressive people.”
Green’s also of course has “(US black) the genitals; always in phr. squeeze (some)one’s lemon,” where the “(US black)” is maybe fair enough for ultimate origin but it was of course mediated to me as to many of my US generational peers via the (UK white) Robert Plant. Some time during the 1978-79 academic year, if memory serves.
Separately, “invaluable though unreliable” sounds like a distinction that others ought to aspire to?
If it’s confused rather than connected then the OED is confused too:
1.c.1909– slang (originally U.S.). Something which is bad or undesirable or which fails to meet one’s expectations.
the answer is a lemon: used to denote that a reply is unsatisfactory or non-existent.
—
I know ‘lemon’ for a useless thing, of course, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it applied to an answer
then the OED is confused too:
Yes I think they are.
It’s a fixed phrase/Almost a nonce phrase, meaning not guessable from the sum of its parts. I remember (I think) my grandmother reciting it in a sing-song intonation.
Contrast ‘the result’s a lemon’ doesn’t work.
по кочану
In Russian supported by that почему ‘why?’ is analysable as по чему ‘by what?’ and потому что ‘because’ as по тому ‘by that’.
I have a school memory of Марина Георгиевна responding thusly to Вова Куперман’s ‘why?’ and softening the answer with И по капусте.
However:
“Кто?” “Хуй в пальто!”
“Как дела?” “Как сажа бела!”
and
“Где?” (where) doesn’t even require more than indistinct grumbling because the rhyme в пизде (in the cunt) will occur to the asker without your hints.
Day saved.
(One of my mental ages is 12.)
seems a bit more like “what?” “chicken butt” than “why?” “because” (quoth my own inner 12-year-old).
and softening the answer with И по капусте.
Nice!
rozele, yes!
But I think the necessity of finding an answer to “why?” can annoy people in ways that answering “what?” doesn’t.
The answer’s a lemon
Say the bells of your mom
/degenerating
or maybe:
The answer’s a lemon
Say the balls of your mom
/degenerating further
Why? Because!
The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms [via GScholar, so I can’t copy] goes on about
(And I see the fruit machine idea in several other GHits.) “possibly” harrumph. No citation. My etymologist’s nose detects bullshit. (I’m sure my grandmother was never familiar with a fruit machine.)
GScholar also alleges the phrase appears in The Summer of Sir Lancelot, which is in a breezy Bertie Wooster style. 1965 but full of archaic idioms, so plausible it’s there. From the same author as the ‘Doctor in the House’ series. I’m failing to pinpoint if/where lemons occur.
@AntC
From the GB snippet on p.59-60 (enlarge to see whole page), in this case it is a real lemon found in an empty handkerchief by a magician.
50-year-old American, never heard it.
re: “guess what? Chicken butt”, I have two groanworthy responses I say all the time when someone asks me a “how long” question, which are “How Long is a Chinese name” and “How long is a piece of rope?”
I have retired the first one due to concerns about being culturally insensitive, and have replaced it with “Someone once asked Abraham Lincoln how long a person’s legs should be. He said ‘long enough to reach the ground’.”
(I’m a middle-school English teacher and get asked how long particular pieces of writing should be several times per hour)
“How Long is a Chinese name”
The literalist in me would say „not very long“. If a teacher told me that as a response to a question about a writing exercise, I would assume the answer is „3 syllables“.
Thank you @PP, got it. I’m afraid it doesn’t advance the enquiry at hand, but I think Mr. Nightrider is at least echoing the phrase. The mise en scène appears to have no question pending, in need of an answer lemonic or otherwise.
Green’s suggests “lemon tart” as an alternative to “apple tart” as rhyming slang for fart. Cf. raspberry. Ngram suggests BrE usage with “answer” peaked in the early 1920s, perhaps due to army use in the war.
The answer’s a lemon tree, dear Watson.
@AG: As a physics teacher I don’t have to answer that question nearly as often, but when I do, I quote my ninth-grade English teacher: “Say what you have to say and then stop.”:
Why? Because!
Needless to say, I’d forgotten all about that post!
Vanya – “How Long is a Chinese name” is a statement, not a question.
Jerry – I might have to use that one!
but when I do, I quote my ninth-grade English teacher: “Say what you have to say and then stop.”
Confucius says: say as much as you need, then stop.
(The linked thread includes about half a dozen other translations of the exact same five-character phrase.)
“How Long is a Chinese name” is a statement, not a question.
Guess I am too literal for bad puns. That’s almost as bad as the corny band patter – “our guitarist is going to now play that old Chinese standard “tu ning”.
definitely Почему? – По кочану и по капусте
but Кто? used to be => Конь в пальто / Дед Пихто.
And Где? => У тебя на бороде, на десятой полке, где гуляют волки
However some of them aren’t rhymed. Say Как зовут? – Зовут зовуткой.
In one of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet novels, someone remarks that their baby brother, born just before WWII, would not know what a lemon was when he heard the expression “The answer’s a lemon”. When I read that some 25 years ago, I realised that I didn’t know what the phrase meant, having only seen it used in contexts such as a humorous title for an article on lemon cookery. I asked an older friend, who told me (IIRC) that it meant that there was no satisfactory answer.
guess what? Chicken butt
It just now occurs to me that this is riotously funny only for those who rhyme what and butt. I am not such a person. But I am slow on the uptake, evidently.
another rhetorical-question riddle (though not, i think, used in these kinds of contexts) that i think i first heard in roger zelazny’s This Immortal / …And Call Me Conrad is “feathers or lead?” – which i assume is a shortening of “which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?”, and do not know whether to believe is in fact greek (or ottoman).
(does anyone happen to know whether there’s been anything interesting written on u.s. sf/f writers of the 1960s-70s and greece? there’s zelazny, delany [repeatedly], russ [the alyx stories] – already an interesting set of vernacular formalists – and i think others…)
Kate Bunting:
I think what may be meant is that someone born just before WWII in Britain would never have encountered a real lemon, because of rationing.
I read a memoir of an English woman travelling to Greece in the early 1950s, who was astounded to experience fresh lemon juice, something she hadn’t tasted since childhood.
Confucius says: say as much as you need, then stop.
Actually, as I recall, that teacher wasn’t that strong on citing sources, at least in ninth grade.
Nah, that one is actually due to the Great Sage of California, Paul Grice.
As one ignorant of the lemon answer, I merely note the wide semantic range. From lemon-freshened to no dice. (In my Mother’s childhood an orange could be a Christmas present.)
Trini Lopez, redoing an Brazilian song:
Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet
But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat
Though Partridge left much to be desired, he (or editors) did note the US 1906 very popular song on picking a lemon.
M. E. Rourke and Richard Carles, I Picked a Lemon in the Garden
of Love, M. Witmark & Son, 1906.
“I picked a lemon where they said only peaches grow.”
We had to sing that in school. Apparently somebody believed it was famous.
The Spectator, 9 June 1950, p.793:
Robert Lynd [1879–1949], Life’s Little Oddities”, (1943) p. 79
I believe Lynd as Y.Y. asked in The New Statesman in 1940; perhaps Humphries was one of the three who replied, though the readership of the two periodicals did not overlap much.
a Lemon in the Garden of Love
Hear it here.
Apropos of which, as always, Ivor Cutler.
I regret that neither my cloth nor the editor of the Spectator would permit me to recount it here. This also explains why it does not appear in reference books.[…]
I asked recently for an explanation of the phrase ‘The answer is a lemon,’ and three correspondents generously came to my aid. As the answer tends towards the indelicate, I will not quote it here.
Well, that’s frustrating! Couldn’t they have rendered it into the decent obscurity of Latin?
Or Greek, if it was really bad. As Gibbon does, regarding the future Empress Theodora’s signature stage act, that so captivated Justinian (one presumes.)
No lemons were harmed during this performance, however.
If I may follow up on my prior mention of Robert Plant (AFAIK not a contributor to either the Spectator or the New Statesman), google translate helpfully offers this as a rendering-into-decent-obscurity of the titular verse of “The Lemon Song”:
Preme me, cara, donec succus per crus meum fluat
Preme me, cara, donec succus per crus meum fluat
Quo modo citreum meum premis, ah
E lecto statim cadam
I should in principle be able to do my own Latin version rather than outsource it to brainless statistical software, but today’s not a day in which I have enough time to spare for such a project.
If “the answer is a lemon” is in Punch, I missed it.
More early-ish UK than US uses, though, both on a merely quick look.
I never heard it in the wild.
Archive.org has examples of the phrase in Punch of Aug. 9, 1922, p. 122 (“I look at my Victory Medal and ask myself, ‘What is the fruit of victory?’ And the answer is a lemon.” Good one!) and later examples. An early dated example is from a 1922 Saturday Evening Post, and before it a 1916 novel, Men, Women and Guns, previously serialized in The Strand.
From 1922 comes also:
MRS BREEN
(To Bloom.) High jinks below stairs. (She gives him the glad eye.) Why didn’t you kiss the spot to make it well! You wanted to.
BLOOM
(Shocked.) Molly’s best friend! Could you?
MRS BREEN
(Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers a pigeon kiss.) Hnhn. The answer is a lemon. Have you a little present for me there?
Punch of Sep. 28, 1921, p. 247, has “The answer’s a lemon.”
Apparently somebody believed it was famous.
I assume the teacher was born in the 40s?
a rendering-into-decent-obscurity
I recently learned that Gibbon did not use the word “decent” in the passage quoted, from chapter 8 in his Memoirs of My Life. It was added in a parody in the Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner.
Source: see the bottom of this excerpt from the Oxford Essential Quotations.
Keith Baxter “My sentiments exactly” p. 139 has an anecdote from c.1963:—
Halfway through the meal Rattigan asked Olivier to tell his joke about the Curate and the Orange. Olivier was disinclined to oblige but Rattigan persisted. It was a simple enough joke:
Thank you for finding that, mollymooly! Not as funny as I had expected. I suppose the curate’s speech was conventionally delivered with a stammer. Sigh.
Maidhc said:
‘I think what may be meant is that someone born just before WWII in Britain would never have encountered a real lemon, because of rationing.’
Yes, I understood that part! My point was that I had never actually heard anyone say “The answer’s a lemon” in conversation, so I didn’t know in what context the little boy might be expected to hear it.
Not as funny as I had expected. I suppose the curate’s speech was conventionally delivered with a stammer. Sigh.
Thank you @mollymooly, but yes. The curate seems to be afflicted with Malapropism rather than a stammer. I don’t see how you could enstammer the punchline to make it funnier.
I feel that as at 1963, this is leaning in to a much older trope. I’m unconvinced we’ve got to the bottom of it.
(And I’m pretty sure my grandmother wouldn’t have that story in mind. Though she did deploy ‘Lord love a duck’ without, I think, ever being aware of its potential lewdness.)
Incidentally, I have just learned that “bedroom utensil” was a genteel name for a chamber pot, not an invented term for a marital aid.
Thanks, mollymooly!
I’m having the same suspicions as AntC. In some early hits such as the one that Y found about the sapper, the question is a complicated arithmetic problem. A similar one is here, cutting off what looks like a complicated geometrical construction involving the Balmer series and that new kind of physics with h. That one’s introduced by “As the Irishman would have said,” which looks as if it just comes from the stereotype of Illogical Irish people, though I suppose a version of the conundrum story could have involved an Irishman instead of a young curate.
Here’s one from 1915, though, where someone says to a friend proposing a business deal, “Isn’t there some catch about it? Come now! I suppose the answer’s a lemon or something of that sort.”
It’s possible that whoever compiled the book was born in the 40s. The teacher just followed the book.
@DP, yes, I meant to say конь в пальто (but this horse can be replaced with penis).
Didn’t know the bearded one.
Also when I teach I try to be as polite and informative with my students as I am with my teachers when I study.
A pre-echo of the Olivier joke is a Conundrum in The Pearl of Dec 1879, although the answer is an orange rather than a lemon.
Is conundrum in these instances being used to mean specifically “charade,” or are they just instances of the more general “puzzle” meaning? If it’s the former, narrower sense, it’s not in the OED.
A pre-echo of the Olivier joke is a Conundrum in The Pearl of Dec 1879
In regard to the phrase ‘You may suck my (w)hole’ in the pornographic magazine The Pearl, we can find this even earlier, in ‘Charade, by Shy Tighe’, Paddy Kelly’s Budget; Or, A Pennyworth of Fun, vol. 1, no. 15, February 27, 1833 (here, p. 119):
I reckon Orange is not intended to have any political meaning here, despite the Irish context. I wonder if an obscene pun on whole is intended in this charade, too?
i wonder how far back “[verb] my whole [body part]” as an obscene dismissal/insult formula in english goes? it currently (at least in my worlds) most often shows up as “eat my whole ass”, but these orange examples look to be the same form (“suck a box/bag of dicks” seems related, perhaps with some crossover from “dumb as a box of hammers” and the like).
This baffled me until I saw the full riddle written in The Pearl. Baxter must have mistranscribed the phrase (“you can suck my whole”), and I suspect he also left out some form of the same idea in the original (o-range) conundrum that was presumably suitable for the ears of the diocese members. Maybe something like “from my whole you may drink sweet juice”.
As a minor quibble, I would consider a range to be an appliance rather than a utensil, but no doubt in the UK, in the 1960s, “utensil” might well have been in common use for such things.
I also suspected Baxter (or Olivier?) had left something out for “my whole”. It could easily have had “suck”—according to Mr. Ngram,“sucking an orange” was as common as “eating an orange” in the 19th century, when the joke was apparently invented,
Baxter’s version of the joke strikes me as ending weakly. The speaker got the fruit wrong and maybe it’s funny that he blurted out the answer (was he supposed to wait for his audience to give up?), but surely somebody could have come up with something dirty for the climax.
Presumably the “suck an orange” thing arises out of thinking of oranges (and citrus fruit generally?) primarily as a source of juice.
???
“My first is an ejaculation, my second goes really long, you can peel and suck my whole, and oh god it isn’t a penis!”
Reading WikiP Orange (fruit), it looks like oranges, and all citrus, are a lot more complicated than one would first think. As it notes, the orange is a cross between mandarins and pomelos back-crossed with mandarins again, with an intermediate generation of bitter oranges. I wondered if perhaps the older cultivars being sold had segments that had either tougher fibers (making them harder to chew), or had more bitter chemicals.
Or maybe the advent of refrigeration changed when oranges could be harvested, which is to say, later in development when they are sweeter, but they can nevertheless be kept longer in an optimally chill environment.
I wondered if perhaps the older cultivars being sold had segments that had either tougher fibers (making them harder to chew), or had more bitter chemicals.
And more seeds? Also according to Wikipedia, navel and Valencia oranges date to the 19th century.
@rozele: “Suck my whole [anything]” hasn’t reached me, not that I’m in touch with the latest slang. I think the pun is on “my whole” as used in charades and “my hole”, as I think Xerîb suggested.