You Want Pickles With That?

No, this isn't a post about cravings. (Besides, most of my cravings are for sweet things.) Yesterday, I walked up behind Andrew as he was talking to a fellow aviator type about some training options he has in July. He said "The wife is due to pickle about that time...." that's when I interrupted him. Pickle?! This is a term I had not been privvy to.

Apparently, in military circles, "to pickle" means to drop one's payload-- bombs, whatever. So I will be double-pickling around late June early July. It's an odd term. Especially when you consider the mythological preference of pregnant women for eating pickles with everything (which, frankly, I have not encountered at all.) So now, in the evolution of things I have called my babies we have "The Alien/s" and "The bananas (and/or plantains)" and now, The Pickles. :)

Terms like that: pickle, 86* (to eliminate), gouge (gossip, info), the "re-rack" (to have a nap after getting out of bed early) and other military-inspired terms (I can't think of them all right now) are so fun. My mom was a Navy gal back in the day, and she used to always say "If it doesn't work, get a bigger hammer." Which was apparently a military phrase. I like it; it suits the way I usually "fix" things.

Waitress terms I think are pretty cool are: "in the weeds" (way too busy and having a hard time catching up); "they stiffed me" (left no tip). Sometimes they're localized terms. At one restaurant I worked, which had been a buffet style place before, we had a big long table full of people come in once and ask didn't we used to have "sweet (swaait) tea (tay-- rhymes with say)" (in the hick-i-est southern accent you can). At that place, "swait tay" was a euphemism for a table of people who were going to run you ragged and not tip.

A friend I used to hang out with used to call people who were a bit nuts "crack heads" and say "are you on crack?" So now that's a general term I like to use for nutty people.

Are there any terms like this that you use, which you picked up somewhere along the way? That you'd have to explain to someone else and they'd likely look at you like you had lost your mind? Not just general slang that everyone would know, but "insider slang"?

On that note, I need to get back to work... I'm workin' on the Buffy chapter today, having sent off my chapter 3 to my committee chair the other day.

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*Although some people claim "86" is an accounting term. I wasn't able to find anything on this on the Internet.