cucumber

Forgive me. All better now.

RT, you know the rules. Kindly bracket that.

Yes! Shuttlecucumbers.

So now I've got this picture in my head of men tossing cucumbers in the air and hitting them to each other with tennis rackets.

And don't forget that great English novel, Peregrine Pickle, by Tobias Smollett (1751).

Oh, and I wasn't reading Boswell, I was eating a cucumber.

I suppose we should quote the full verse from The Beggar's Opera. Mrs Peachum is 'in a very great passion' about Polly's sudden marriage:

Our Polly is a sad slut! nor heeds what we have taught her,
I wonder any man alive will ever rear a daughter,
For she must have both hoods and gowns, and hoops to swell her pride,
With scarfs and stays, and gloves and lace, and she'll have men beside;
And when she's drest with care and cost, all-tempting, fine and gay,
As men should serve a cucumber, she flings herself away.

So yes, 'serve' = "treat, deal with", and it fits what Dr Johnson said.

An interesting citation, qroqqa. If I understand it correctly, in the line "as men should serve a cucumber", "serve" means "fling away" not "place on the table for someone to eat".

Are you enjoying reading Boswell?

On the beach here there is a singular variety of curious stones. I picked up one very like a small cucumber. By the by, Dr. Johnson told me, that Gay's line in the "Beggar's Opera," "As men should serve a cucumber," &c. has no waggish meaning, with reference to men flinging away cucumbers as too cooling, which some have thought; for it has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
—Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 5 October 1773, on the island of Coll