the.com/cool as a cucumber
The compliment you give someone who refused to panic while everyone else combusted.
means To be remarkably calm, composed, and unruffled under pressure or stress.
from The phrase trades on a real botanical fact: cucumbers, even sitting in a hot garden, have an interior that stays notably cooler than the surrounding air — a quirk of their high water content. English speakers had linked 'cool' with unflappable composure since at least the 1600s, but it was a 1732 poem by John Gay, with the line 'cool as a cucumber,' that fused the comparison into the fixed phrase we still use today.
- actual science
- cucumber interior stays ~11°F cooler than the outside air
- first recorded
- a 1732 John Gay poem used the phrase
- irony
- cucumbers are 96% water, basically edible calm
- overused by
- anyone describing a suspiciously unbothered liar