Historical "Factoids"

[Gaybutton]

Are these true and correct? Beats me. A friend sent these to me in an Email and they at least seem plausible to me. Do they to you? Let's see:

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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" and 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 odour, 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, then the children, and finally, 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 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.

 

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...

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I love these kinds of things. If you have any more, please post them.

[Rogie]

What's a factoid?

 

The use of that word makes me very suspicious, and in any case some of them are clearly the figment of a fertile imagination. The last couple in particular are just outrageous!

 

Here is my contribution:

 

Does the use of the word 'pop' in these two well-known expressions have the same meaning?

 

Pop goes the weasel

Pop your clogs

 

The answer is probably. Pop means to pawn so popping your clogs would be pawning them, something you would never do (in the old days) to such an important item yourself, so logicaly it would be your surviving relatives who would do that. Hence popping your clogs = to die

 

In pop goes the weasel, the pawn meaning for 'pop' seems to fit, but 'weasel' is altogether more unclear, as per this quote taken from Wikipedia . . .

 

Perhaps because of the obscure nature of the lyrics there have been many suggestions for their significance, particularly over the meaning of the phrase 'Pop! goes the weasel', including: that it is a tailor's flat iron, a hatter's tool, a clock reel used for measuring in spinning, a piece of silver plate, or that 'weasel and stoat' is Cockney rhyming slang for 'coat', which is 'popped or pawned' to visit or after visiting the Eagle pub, that it is a mishearing of weevil or vaisselle, that it was a nickname of James I, and that 'rice' and 'treacle' are slang terms for potassium nitrate and charcoal and that therefore the rhyme refers to the gunpowder plot. Other than correspondences none of these theories has any additional evidence to support it, and some can be discounted because of the known history of the song. Iona and Pete Opie observed that, even at the height of the dance craze in the 1850s no-one seemed to know what the phrase meant.

[ceejay]

To add to "piss poor" there is "taking the piss". Right into the nineteenth century, the only source of alum (use as a mordant in dyeing cloth) in England was alum shales around Whitby in Yorkshire. The final part of the process involved rendering the alum with stale urine. There was a whole fleet of coasters, running up to Whitby, carrying nothing but cargoes of stale piss.

That much it is fact. It is claimed that the captains of these coasters, preferring not to reveal their trade, would claim to be wine shippers in polite conversation and, if someone was impolite enough to take them up on this they would do so by saying "No, you're taking the piss"

[Gaybutton]

"No, you're taking the piss"

Then I shudder to even think about what the origin of "taking a shit" must be . . .

 

"Why do we say 'take a shit'? I never take a shit. I leave it there."

- George Carlin