Summer is the season of cucumber news in Norway, referring to the fact that cucumbers are 96% water - just like the news many editors fill their pages with at a time of year when most politicians retreat to their dark lairs for intravenous replenishment. Any unimportant news may qualify as a cucumber, but editors with any skill go for the usual reader favourites - sex and violence - or perhaps something more seasonal, like travel or the weather. Last summer, VG dedicated several front pages to weather forecasts, every one of them extremely positive. I was out of the country, but the weather must have been really bad for a trick like that to work more than once or twice. In any case, the formula for news is of course the same in cucumber season as in the rest of the year, you just have to crank up the volume to conceal the lack of content.

Yesterday was a typical cucumber day in the tabloids, and serves to illustrate the difference between a mediocre cucumber and a really good one. Dagbladet's front page story on how a female patient woke up in the hospital with a senile old man sitting naked in her bed, is a rather mediocre cucumber. Nothing much happened, and Dagbladet's attempt to compensate for the low sex & violence quotient with the overused Disgraceful State of Public Hospitals angle is rather feeble. (A better version would have had the female patient waking up naked in the senile old man's bed - now that's got potential.)

Compare this with VG, which could reveal, all across the front page, the stunning news that Scandinavian sperm is in high demand among American women.

Sperm from tall, blonde men is so much in demand among childless Americans that the Scandinavian sperm bank Cryos has now opened its second branch in the US. Many Norwegian students in Denmark pay their student loans with second jobs as sperm donors, the company confirms.

There's not much facts here to back up the headline ("Loves Scandinavian sperm"), but that is of less relevance. This cucumber is as fresh and tasty as they come. It's totally unexpected, and plays on both sexual, racial and nationalist strings. The Americans may have the most powerful economy and military in the world, but their loins are weak and infertile, and their females want our sperm! Our tribe is strong!

In todays editions, VG has real news on its front page, while Dagbladet carries a story that is certainly an improvement over yesterday's, but still lacks most of the attributes of a good cucumber: Before leaving on vacation, many pet owners apparently throw their cute little kitties and bunnies in the garbage without bothering to kill them. This cucumber has a shock element, which is good, but errs a bit on the overly gross side, I think, and has the added disadvantage of a strong guilt-element. (This probably comes from habit). I don't want to read about the wrongs of my society when I'm hypothetically lying on the beach with a newspaper, I want to feel good about myself. Following VG's lead, the story would have been vastly improved if it were about Americans who throw living pets in the garbage. This is probably as much and as little true about them as it is about us, so there's no excuse for Dagbladet to miss this opportunity to best VG with the ultimate cucumber. Their performance so far has been unimpressive. But the summer is still young - stay tuned for more news without content.

This may be slightly offtopic, but I just wanted to say that I was stunned to notice that the word "barnløse", used in the VG article, seems to be a direct Norwegian counterpart of "bairn" (Northern English word for "child") and "less."

One can get the jist of a surprising amount of Norwegian given enough familiarity with Northern English dialects - "lake" is "leike" ("play"), "cakehole" ("mouth") from "kake" ... Of course, Norwegian and standard English are similar anyway, both being Germanic, but there's still more comprehensibility than one has a right to expect, given more than 2,000 years of separate development.

Abiola: I understand there was a lot of Viking influence on English, especially in the north, and also in Scotland. So there wasn't exactly 2000 years of separate development - not sure the victims of Viking raids and conquest would attest to that. ;)

"Agurktid" or cucumber time in the newspapers does not refer to the fact that cucumbers are 96% water.

The expression is originally German and "sauregurkenzeit". In English "time of the sour cucumbers". This was the time of year when nothing happened and they sent all the journalists out to compare cucumber prices. In the old days the cucumber was a very expensive vegetable and the readers loved it.

:-)
Bård

Bård: You know, that's the third explanation I've heard for the term yet. The first is that it referred to newspaper stories about funnily shaped cucumbers. When I wrote this, I only found the explanation about the high water content. Your version sounds more plausible, but, just in case, do you have a source for it?

For the record, I'm tuned into language and slang and idioms in America, and I've never heard the phrases involving cucumbers that have been written here.

Look at "wally" on this page:

http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/w.htm

Maybe some kind of connection...

The term 'cucumber' for last-ditch trivia in the news media is unknown here in the US, or, at least, by me. The common, standard US equivalent is 'boilerplate'

Did I write Heenry? One 'e' only. Sorry.

Since I find your site to provide a balanced and thoughtful response to world happenings, I would like to send more emails to you on occasion. I think this time I've got my name right, Henry,(must do better proofreading), and will spell it that way in future. Thanks for listening!

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