Of Pigs and Cucumbers

Pleased to be back in Blighty and pleased too to see that the Economist has launched Johnson, a blog about language and politics. From the most recent entry:

Germany has a cranky coalition government and garrulous politicians, and so conditions are good for political insults. In one intramural fight a health ministry official from the liberal FDP likened the CSU—Bavarian conservatives—to a Wildsau, or wild pig, for its rough handling of the liberals’ health-reform ideas. But the better insult was the riposte by the CSU man, who called the liberals a Gurkentruppe, literally a troop of cucumbers. Anglophone journalists have been puzzling over how to turn this into recognisable English. The Guardian honoured both literal meaning and homonymy by rendering it as “gherkin troops” and explaining that it means “rank amateurs”. The Financial Times opted for the colloquial “bunch of losers”. The Economist went with “bush leaguers”, which kept the sporting connotation it has in German but was a little unfair to non-American readers: it is a term drawn from baseball.

But why compare incompetent athletes to cucumbers? We have no definitive answer yet.