The origin of phrases

[Guest lvdkeyes]

I am not sure of the accuracy of these, but I found them interesting.

 

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery.........if you had to do this to survive> you were "Piss Poor" But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot.............they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low.

 

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell . .. . brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married. Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"

 

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip an and fall off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

 

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed.

Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

 

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "Dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh(straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.

 

(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)

 

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly

vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.

 

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special... When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.

 

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

 

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

 

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.

 

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus,someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer...

 

And that's the truth...Now, whoever said History was boring ! ! !

[Gaybutton]

I'm fascinated by those. I never knew any of them. I love this kind of stuff.

[Guest]

[quote name='lvdkeyes' date='09 August 2009 - 08:24 PM' timestamp='1249824280'

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus,someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer...

 

And that's the truth...Now, whoever said History was boring ! ! !

 

LOL I don't quite believe this one!

[Guest lvdkeyes]

Which one don't you believe?

[Guest fountainhall]

Great stories, and I am sure they are correct.

 

I was once in Japan having dinner with 3 other guys all of whom spoke very good english. As we were having coffee, I suggested we go on to a disco because I felt like "letting my hair down" that evening. One friend thought about this for a moment, and then said - "yes, I am thinking of getting my hair cut, too." I had forgotten how much conversational english relies on idioms.

 

I am guessing the phrase derives from Victorian ladies who usually had their hair done up in a bun during the day, but would take out the pins and "let it down" prior to some hanky panky in the bedroom.

[Guest]

Which one don't you believe?

 

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus,someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer...

[Guest lvdkeyes]

Actually, I had heard a long time ago.

[Guest fountainhall]

Seems like GT is correct. The ringer story is indeed fanciful.

 

According to 'The Phrase Finder' website, 'dead' ringer' means 'an exact duplicate'. It continues -

 

Origin

 

You may well know that dead ringer means exact duplicate, but why is that? To a non-English speaker the two terms appear to have nothing in common. So, why dead; why ringer?

 

Let's first dispense with the nonsensical idea that's sometimes put forward as the origin of this phrase, i.e. that it refers to people who were prematurely buried and who pulled on bell ropes that were attached to their coffins in order to attract attention, But how does the premature burial derivation of 'dead ringer' explain why it means 'exact duplicate'?

 

A ringer is a horse substituted for another of similar appearance in order to defraud the bookies. This word originated in the US horse-racing fraternity at the end of the 19th century. The word is defined for us in a copy of the Manitoba Free Press from October 1882:

"A horse that is taken through the country and trotted under a false name and pedigree is called a 'ringer.'"

 

It has since been adopted into the language to mean any very close duplicate. As a verb, 'ring' has long been used to mean 'exchange/substitute' in a variety of situations, most of them illegal.

 

So, that's ringer; what about dead? Dead, in the sense of lifeless, is so commonly used that we tend to ignore its other meanings. The meaning that's relevant here is exact or precise. This is demonstrated in many phrases; 'dead shot', 'dead centre', 'dead heat', etc.

 

So there you have it - but I still prefer the graveyard story

[Guest fountainhall]

Oops! Sorry to be the party pooper, but Phrasefinder also demolishes another couple of stories - the meaning of 'threshold' and 'raining cats and dogs'.

 

 

Threshold

 

A threshold is called that because people step on it (= pound it, beat it, with their feet), not because it was associated with threshed straw (beaten to separate the grain from the stalks). The "'threshold' from straw" story probably comes from an essay on medieval daily life that has made the rounds of the Internet for years and is full of imaginative explanations of words and phrases, disguised as historical fact. A more reliable source, the Oxford English Dictionary, says of "threshold" that "the first element is generally identified with THRESH v. (?in its original sense 'to tread, trample')."

 

 

Raining Cats and Dogs

 

It has also been suggested that cats and dogs were washed from roofs during heavy weather. This is a widely repeated tale. It got a new lease of life with the e-mail message "Life in the 1500s", which began circulating on the Internet in 1999.

 

This is nonsense of course. It hardly needs debunking but, lest there be any doubt, let's do that anyway. In order to believe this tale we would have to accept that dogs lived in thatched roofs, which, of course, they didn't. Even accepting that bizarre idea, for dogs to have slipped off when it rained they would have needed to be sitting on the outside of the thatch - hardly the place an animal would head for as shelter in bad weather.

 

The much more probable source of 'raining cats and dogs' is the prosaic fact that, in the filthy streets of 17th/18th century England, heavy rain would occasionally carry along dead animals and other debris. The animals didn't fall from the sky, but the sight of dead cats and dogs floating by in storms could well have caused the coining of this colourful phrase. Jonathan Swift described such an event in his satirical poem 'A Description of a City Shower', first published in the 1710 collection of the Tatler magazine.

 

 

What did you say about history, ldvkeyes? Mind you, in all these cases, I reckon fiction is infinitely preferable to fact.

[Guest lvdkeyes]

I said in my first post that I wasn't sure of the accuracy.

[Bob]

Well, do you buy this one (found it somewhere on the net):

 

Blowing Smoke Up Your Ass.....

 

[Guest fountainhall]

I said in my first post that I wasn't sure of the accuracy

 

As Henry Ford is famously quoted as saying: "History is bunk." In fact, he said "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition."

 

Give me tradition any day, I say. Even if it is tradition a la internet, it's more interesting.

[Guest]

Well, do you buy this one (found it somewhere on the net):

 

Blowing Smoke Up Your Ass.....

 

I wonder if filled with weed instead of tocacco it would create a totally different air?

[Guest fountainhall]

I wonder if filled with weed instead of tocacco it would create a totally different air?

 

Better than asparagus, I trust

 

Doubts about the credibility of tobacco enemas led to the popular phrase "blow smoke up your ass"

 

Wonder if 'blowing' too hard led to the derivation of the song "Smoke gets in your eyes"?

[Gaybutton]

Fountainhall's versions may be the accurate ones, but I sure like lvdkeyes' versions much better.

 

Something I've always wondered about is "enema." I don't wonder about the word. I wonder about how it came to be. Somebody had to think of that. And then, somebody had to be the first person to voluntarily allow a lot of water to be squirted up his ass. I don't know how that came about, but some interesting pictures certainly come to mind . . .

[Guest lvdkeyes]

Somebody probably had kee niao (literal translation).

[Bob]

Something I've always wondered about is "enema." I don't wonder about the word. I wonder about how it came to be. Somebody had to think of that. And then, somebody had to be the first person to voluntarily allow a lot of water to be squirted up his ass. I don't know how that came about, but some interesting pictures certainly come to mind . . .

 

Sounds like a George Carlin thought. And, in honor of him (and our shared appreciation of his weirdly wonderful thinking), heres:

 

HOLY GHOST ENEMA

[Gaybutton]

HOLY GHOST ENEMA

That's quite an enigmtic enema . . .