More bananas

I noticed a new-to-me meaning of the French word 'banana' at reference 1, taken from a Maigret story. And now, from one of the pieces about Simenon's travels in his boat 'Ostrogoth', tucked into the end of Volume III of said stories, I learn of a another new-to-me meaning.

It seems that in the far north of Norway, in the 1930's, where the cod fishery was the main business, rows and rows of cod fillets used to be hung up to dry in the arctic winds, out the back of the arctic villages. These cods were known as bananas. This in a part of the world where a fresh cabbage was an almost unheard of luxury.

Maybe Simenon had a special relationship with bananas. Maybe they were another luxury item at the time, something which only successful writers like him could afford, although this seems a bit unlikely as it must also have been about the time of the invention of the banana republic in Central America.

In the course of researching bananas I also came across pince monseigneur, a splendid phrase which denotes the sort of crow bar mostly known to me as a wrecking bar, but also as a jemmy. I remember a carpenter once telling me about travelling home late one night, with his tools in his bicycle basket, getting stopped by a policeman because he was carrying a jemmy, thus demonstrating a probability that he was about to go a burglaring.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/railway-lore.html.