{"id":142804,"date":"2020-02-13T11:00:11","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T16:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=142804"},"modified":"2020-02-13T12:39:18","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T17:39:18","slug":"how-to-leave-your-lover-with-lemons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/13\/how-to-leave-your-lover-with-lemons\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Leave Your Lover with Lemons"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Valentine\u2019s Day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Postcard, originally mailed in Michigan on February 13, 1909<\/p><\/div>\n

Back when my husband was my boyfriend, he mentioned an antique postcard that he\u2019d picked up and mailed to his parents. On it, a man\u2019s outreached hands held green and yellow oviform fruits; the type read \u201cA Lime and a Lemon With My Compliments.\u201d Andy didn\u2019t quite understand the card, he told me, but it had amused him, and he wondered what had become of it.<\/p>\n

That was early in our relationship. I was eager to be lovable. Shopping eBay for another copy for him, I scored two, both showing a crateful of citrus. \u201cThis Box of Oranges, with my Compliments, from Florida,\u201d went one; \u201cThis Box of Grape-Fruit With My Compliments From Florida,\u201d went the other. I\u2019m from Florida, so the postcards were on-target, and next visit home I sent them out to desired effect. Vitamin C protects the body against scurvy\u2014that was the meaning in my mind. You offered lemons to people you approved of to keep them prime.<\/p>\n

Neither of us yet knew the true meaning behind the phrase \u201chanded a lemon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, I bought Andy a manual citrus press, and went back online to find a vintage postcard to accompany the present. That\u2019s where it all began.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There was a black-and-white photograph from 1908, in which a lady dropped the fruit into the palms of a gentleman down on bended knee: \u201cA LEMON FOR YOU<\/small>.\u201d Another, from the same era, shows a teddy bear in a top hat clutching a lemon\u2014a look of shock on his mug\u2014while a teddy bear in a skirt made her exit under a parasol: \u201cWell! Well! You never can tell.\u201d A card made of leather (yes) suggested \u201cThis \ud83c\udf4e is what they say Eve handed Adam. But don\u2019t you think it was a \ud83c\udf4b?\u201d I bought them, and kept sussing.<\/p>\n

There was \u201cTo my Valentine\u201d spelled out on a huge lemon; with that lemon a pretty, pink-cheeked brunette is torpedoing a blonde man in a pinstripe suit and ascot:<\/p>\n

\u2019Tis a lemon that I hand you
\n<\/em>And bid you now \u201cskidoo,\u201d
\n<\/em>Because I love another\u2014
\n<\/em>There is no chance for you<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One card just had a bright lemon embossed on the front. It was addressed to Iowa, and somebody had simply penned \u201cHa! ha! ha!\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yikes<\/em>, I thought, as it dawned on me that I\u2019d accidentally given Andy\u2014and he\u2019d accidentally given his parents\u2014some kind of antiquated fuck you. I turned to newspaper archives to track down the origins of this citrusy slur.<\/p>\n

The earliest trace I found was in a humor column in a paper owned by Joseph Pulitzer, from 1905: \u201cDo you think that J. Pierpont Morgan ever said \u2018what\u2019s the use\u2019 when he thought somebody had handed him a lemon?\u201d The origins of the slang were a blur, but New Yorkers claimed it as New Yorkese. The language seems to have bobbed up just as the city was honing its reputation as a place where people\u2019s fortune could be made or broken in a day. In such a place, you were liable to be handed the lemon. \u201cThe stage, race track, [football] grid-iron, [baseball] diamond, and club room all have stories of their own,\u201d a daily reported, describing scenarios where what you got was not what you expected. Or what you wanted. Or deserved. (Or felt<\/em> you deserved.) \u201cThe lemon is sour,\u201d a clip from that time reads. \u201c\u2018To sour anything\u2019 needs no explanation. It is the opposite of sweet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Henry James apparently said he could derive \u201cno meaning\u201d from the expression \u201cto hand someone a lemon,\u201d and the press set itself on him. \u201cAt any rate, [the phrase] possesses the advantage of terseness over equally meaningless expressions used by Mr. James,\u201d one journalist spat. \u201cLemons?\u201d another hissed. \u201cWhy, Mr. James himself has handed lemons to a patient public, lo!, these twenty years.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I asked Greg Zacharias, the director of the Center for Henry James Studies at Creighton University, for some context. \u201cFor a long time,\u201d he told me, \u201cprobably beginning in the 1870s or certainly the 1880s, James was regarded as an unnecessarily difficult writer.\u201d James lived abroad, in England and France, for two decades and developed an \u201ceven more elaborate \u2018late style\u2019.\u201d In 1904\u201305, he returned to America for a tour and a series of lectures, after which he returned to England and published The American Scene<\/em>, a travelogue of his adventures and a theory of the country he had left behind. When the item about him hating on \u201chanded a lemon\u201d appeared in November 1906, Harper\u2019s Bazaar <\/em>had just run the first part of James\u2019s essay \u201cThe Speech of American Women.\u201d The piece was \u201clike click-bait,\u201d Zacharias said. James blasted what he described as \u201cthe crudity\u201d of the young women. \u201cHe criticized their pronunciation, and their use of colloquialisms,\u201d Zacharias added. To many, the lemon episode confirmed Henry James as \u201ctotally out of touch.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1907, the Boston Herald<\/em> was quoting a fruit dealer who complained that the language \u201chanded a lemon\u201d was hurting the lemon trade. \u201cTo try and belittle the very best friend we have in the line of fruit is unjust,\u201d someone agreed. If you had to publicize disappointment with produce, he went on, \u201cwhy not \u2026 an overripe cucumber or a frozen tomato?\u201d How could a lemon tender \u201canything but a compliment\u201d?<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are little lemons and big lemons, old ones, fresh ones, shriveled and rusty ones\u2014all being handed to somebody all the time,\u201dThe St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/em>, in 1906. Lemons from that period included a variety called \u201cthe Carnegie,\u201d a clear reference to the philanthropist\u2019s book-less libraries. But it was still unclear to me just how this meaning of \u201clemon\u201d had originated.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I called the lexicographer-linguist Grant Barrett<\/a>, who cohosts the public radio program A Way with Words<\/a> and specializes in slang, he immediately pulled up Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>. \u201cI\u2019m getting really wonky really fast here,\u201d he admitted. \u201cBut there\u2019s a cutoff when you\u2019re looking at dictionaries, because once periodicals started becoming digitized in the late eighties, the ability to do historical work exploded. People like me\u2014and there\u2019s a bunch of us\u2014know that if your entry hasn\u2019t been updated since the late nineties or early 2000s, there\u2019re probably earlier uses out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The main core of lemon\u2019s definition included 1.c.\u2014\u201cslang<\/em> (originally U.S.<\/em>). Something which is bad or undesirable or which fails to meet one\u2019s expectations.\u201d\u2014and 1.d.\u2014\u201cto hand<\/em> (someone) a lemon<\/em>: to pass off a sub-standard article as good; to swindle (a person); to do (someone) down.\u201d Looking at those entries, Barrett pointed out that the first citations were from 1909 and 1906, respectively; and the last ones were from 1970 and 1972. The entries hadn\u2019t been adapted in half a century. \u201cOED<\/em> probably hasn\u2019t done enough work on lemon since then,\u201d Barrett said, leaving it there.<\/p>\n

Actually, Oxford<\/em>\u2019s 1.b. entry cites an earlier slang use of lemon: \u201cA person with a tart or snappy disposition (quot. 1863). More usually (slang<\/em>), a simpleton, a loser; a person easily deluded or taken advantage of [\u2026].\u201d But Barrett was not having it: \u201cThe problem,\u201d he said, \u201cis the gap between that date and the next date is really long. Green\u2019s Dictionary<\/em> [of Slang<\/em>] also has that gap: 1863 to 1909. That gap is a real<\/em> problem,\u201d Barrett stressed. \u201cI don\u2019t like that gap.\u201d Green\u2019s <\/em>also had an entry with a citation from the early nineteenth century, but for very good reasons (which were complicated, and involved Google\u2019s metadata), Barrett brushed that one aside as well. The provenances of slang are incredibly hard to nail down. \u201cThe frustrating thing about the digitization of newspapers,\u201d Barrett said, \u201cis that new stuff is made available all the time, so you can\u2019t rely on your work to stay current. And we forget the role newspapers had in spreading slang. It didn\u2019t take email and social media\u2014newspapers got things around the country. Sometimes it wasn\u2019t the papers, it was the bar all the reporters hung out at. They palled around. They were frenemies\u2014they stole from each other. It wasn\u2019t unknown for them to write each other\u2019s stories while they were drunk!\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Posted in 1912 by the secretary of the North Valley Literary Society to inform its members that a tax of 25 cents had been imposed on each of them.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

On occasion, old slang reenters contemporary popular culture. Barrett gave the example of \u201cginger\u201d to mean \u201credhead,\u201d which has been used since the 1820s by the British, but not by Americans until South Park<\/em>, and then Harry Potter<\/em>, introduced them to it. \u201cAnother instance was Val Kilmer in Tombstone<\/em> saying, \u2018I\u2019m your huckleberry<\/a>.\u2019\u201d Simply put, he was the man for the mission. The 1993 movie line made lingo most only knew from Mark Twain go viral, an upshot no one anticipated because slang is so spontaneous. Forcing slang almost assuredly results in a nonstarter. (Consider Gretchen trying to make \u201cfetch\u201d happen in Mean Girls<\/em>.) Likewise, attempts to consolidate meaning tend to go nowhere; or rather, the meaning runs in multiple directions. \u201cOften, slang never really settles out,\u201d Barrett explained. In fact, \u201chuckleberry\u201d also referred to an insignificant or worthless person, and how Twain intended it for Finn is subject to debate.<\/p>\n

In a forum online, I\u2019d seen an exchange come up from Shakespeare\u2019s play Love\u2019s Labour\u2019<\/em>s Lost<\/em> where one character suggests a lemon had been gifted to another character instead of precious nutmeg. Could the meaning we attach to lemons have roots, like so much else, in the bard? I asked Barrett. \u201cAgain, gaps are suspicious,\u201d he told me. \u201cShakespeare has been studied for hundreds of years\u2014why would it take so long to happen? Almost all of the expressions we know from Shakespeare show continuous use. It\u2019s very rare for Shakespeare to contribute something freshly into the language.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barrett eventually sleuthed out a song<\/a> titled \u201cA Lemon in the Garden of Love,\u201d by the Broadway composer Richard Carle. (\u201cA million peaches round me \/ Yet I would like to know \/ Why I picked a lemon in the garden of love \/ Where they say only peaches grow.\u201d) He believed this to be the popularizer, the word historians use for the source that renders a phrase recognizable to the general public.\u201cThe song\u2019s mentioned a lot in 1906, 1907,\u201d Barrett said, \u201cand that\u2019s when we see this term [handed a lemon] really take off.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHanding a lemon to someone\u201d fell into disuse, but it still haunts the proverb \u201cWhen life gives you lemons, make lemonade.\u201d For the most part, we\u2019ll never know exactly where a slang phrase started, or why it stayed with us, or why it died out, or when it might come back around. It’s like love. Barrett cautioned against being overly distracted by first uses and key popularizers. You can see the culture move most clearly through \u201cbursts of activity\u201d\u2014like the postcards.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have filed them under \u201cHow To Leave Your Lover With Lemons.\u201d As soon as the phrase got out in the world, \u201chanded a lemon\u201d was applied as rejection and breakup parlance. There\u2019s little as untoward as bad romance. \u201cIt\u2019s striking how meme-like these are,\u201d Barrett said, studying the postcards. \u201cThey\u2019re all women handing lemons to men?\u201d Indeed they were: turn-of-the-century Juliets jilting would-be Romeos, a rebalancing of the gender power differential. \u201cThey seem ready for use again,\u201d Barrett said, and I giggled. I was thinking of the stash of postcards I planned to send my dear, unsuspecting husband.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chantel Tattoli is a freelance journalist. She\u2019s contributed to\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>VanityFair.com<\/a>, the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>Orion\u00a0and\u00a0is at work on a cultural biography of Copenhagen\u2019s statue of the Little Mermaid.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Valentine’s day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow to Leave Your Lover with Lemons by Chantel Tattoli<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 13, 2020 \u2013 This Valentine's day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/13\/how-to-leave-your-lover-with-lemons\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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