Pickled monarch

I’m currently a little over a hundred pages into Andrew Roberts’s 700+ page The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. It’s excellent so far, and full of surprises. Here’s one.

This is the twenty-year old George, Prince of Wales writing to his tutor and “dearest friend,” John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute in 1758:

What a pretty pickle I should be in a future day if I had not your sagacious counsels.

To “be in a pickle” is not an expression I would have imagined being current in the 1730s, so it surprised to me both 1) that the expression is so old and also 2) that it’s survived to the present. Most such casual idioms go stale pretty quickly—and the more specific they are the more so. I don’t imagine much of anything written nowadays will be intelligible by the end of the century.

But notice that what I at first took to be an oddity of grammatical structure actually suggests the idiom has changed a bit: George says “what a pretty pickle I should be,” not “I should be in.” I can’t be certain that this isn’t just a twenty-year old expressing himself imprecisely (though the volume, style, and erudition of George’s letters suggests otherwise), but if not, the idiom as used by George makes himself the pickle. And in this period, the pickle could be either something soaked in brine or something served up covered in a particular salty sauce. Here’s the Online Etymology Dictionary:

The meaning “cucumber preserved in pickle” first recorded 1707, via use of the word for the salty liquid in which meat, etc. was preserved (c. 1500). Colloquial figurative sense of “a sorry plight, a state or condition of difficulty or disorder” is recorded by 1560s, from the time when the word still meant a sauce served on meat about to be eaten.

Served up garnished and ready to eat—an altogether more precarious image than even that suggested by our continued use of the phrase, and one appropriate to the situation George found himself in following the death of his father but before the death of his hostile and mean-spirited grandfather. At any rate, this figurative sense is much older than the more specific meaning of a pickled cucumber, a usage that was still pretty recent in George’s youth. Presumably, to be “in a pickle,” in which you are the hapless victim of a bad situation, is a mutation based on the baseball/tag game.

Another odd example—from the infinite and labyrinthine cellars and archival storage closets of English—of what makes even seemingly unexceptional aspects of the language fun and diverting.

I wrote about Roberts’s approach to history about a year ago. You can read that here.

Addendum: Speaking of historical oddities and surprises, here’s an offhand observation and ironic note from the very first chapter:

The Prince and Princess of Wales’s Court was a close-knit group that made its own amusements. In 1748, Lady Hervey noted that the young Prince George and the other royal children were playing ‘at baseball, a play all who are or have been schoolboys are well acquainted with.’ She added that ‘the ladies as well as the gentlemen join in this amusement.’ It was a form of rounders that later became popular in America—a game that, ironically, George III played but George Washington did not.