Winkle Pickers, Olives and the Beginnings of Things

A while ago Kacycarr asked the question "what are winkle pickers?" I'd never heard of them, so off I went to Wiki. They're a kind of shoe. With a pointy toe. They're named after the pointy thing you use to pick out the winkle from its shell. So you can eat it. It's a rather tenuous connection, I'd say.

It originated in England of course. Where they say whistle and flute and they mean suit, or Hampstead Heath instead of teeth, or Scotch eggs instead of legs, mince pies instead of eyes, chalk farms instead of arms. So if you went to a restaurant which had Scotch eggs or mince pies on the menu, you might be forgiven for running out screaming in terror. Imaginative race, the English, and sometimes they leave off the rhyming part, just to confuse you a bit more. But I digress.

Tenuous or not, somebody made the connection one day between a crustacean and a shoe and somebody else liked and repeated it. At first it was probably a joke amongst friends and now it's an accepted part of the English language.

The beginnings of things that we now take for granted fascinates me, because everything always starts with one person, doesn't it? One imaginative person, doing something inventive and out of the ordinary, possibly even on a whim, to relieve boredom, or as a joke or because they just had the idea and said what if? Usually it's downright ridiculous in the view of the general populace.

Take coffee for instance. A raw coffee bean is vile. The taste should be enough to ward off any kind of desire to do anything with it, any kind of suspicion that anything can be done. Who on earth decided to roast it then grind it up, and pour boiling water over it? What would make them think of it?

What about olives anyone who's tasted a raw olive knows how ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING they are. Bitter bitter bitter. Eugh! But some enterprising individual soaked some in salted water for two weeks and hallelujah, they became one of the most delicious edibles (that's not a very graceful word, is it?) on earth.

Imagine the scene: some dreamer (according to her friends) picks a bunch of raw olives and sticks them in a bucket with salt water. Said friends all laugh: "Ridiculous! Absurd! Waste of time! What can that possibly achieve?"

"I don't know" says dreamer. Every day she changes the water. Maybe she's bored. She tastes a bit of olive. Still disgusting. Eugh! Spits it out. Perhaps after a week begins to think her friends are right. Maybe she should toss the darn things away. Give up. But for some reason she doesn't, she's kind of stubborn that way. So waves of doubt slowly give way to the bigger idea, as the olive's taste transmogrifies. That's also an ungraceful word, whoever thought of it? Wiki could probably tell me. But I digress again.

One miraculous day the dreamer tastes an olive, probably still expecting the same old, same old bitter taste and voila! Miracle of miracles. "Eureka!" shouts our dreamer, laughing with glee. "You see? You see?" At first, people who haven't been present probably don't believe it. Maybe they live far away. They laugh at the idea, and don't bother to try it. And now? Everybody loves an olive. Okay, not everybody. Almost, though.

The creativity of the human race and some people's capacity to persist in the face of all logical argument that says you're being ridiculous and unrealistic so you might as well give up boggles my mind.