- Joined
- May 18, 1999
- Messages
- 15,395
Some of you may have wondered about my sig line and I know for sure that at least two of my friends here have because they sent me the article below so now we know the whyfores and the withevers but not the spirit I put it in for.
I put it in as a small token of my childhood and getting, "knocked as dead as a doornail." or, "whupped upside the head so hard that I'd be deader than a doornail." or, "The cowboy was deader than a doornail." or similar incidences where people, animals, and things, were in the state of being, "Deader than a doornail." Being, "Deader than a doornail" meant that you were G-d****ed Dead or the unspeakable, like, since as children we weren't allowed to cuss where grownups could/would catch us and even then most of us never thought about cussing even then, that came with the loss of innocence and purity that all kids are born with and ought to keep at least into their late teens but most do not these days. I yearn for those simpler days when things were indeed, "Deader than a doornail" and not the dead and deadly, gory, and bloody state that people, animals, and things find themselves in today.
How many of you remember the days when things were, "Deader than a doornail?"
And now the real story. I never realized there was one.
DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
[Q] From Clyde W Hathaway: How about dead as a doornail?
[A] This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeares Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.
But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Could it be because of the repetition of sounds, and the much better rhythm of the phrase compared with the version without door? Almost certainly the euphony has caused the phrase to survive longer than the alternatives Ive quoted. But could there something special about a doornail?
The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.
But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it cant be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you cant use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because theyd been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether its right or not we will probably never know.
I put it in as a small token of my childhood and getting, "knocked as dead as a doornail." or, "whupped upside the head so hard that I'd be deader than a doornail." or, "The cowboy was deader than a doornail." or similar incidences where people, animals, and things, were in the state of being, "Deader than a doornail." Being, "Deader than a doornail" meant that you were G-d****ed Dead or the unspeakable, like, since as children we weren't allowed to cuss where grownups could/would catch us and even then most of us never thought about cussing even then, that came with the loss of innocence and purity that all kids are born with and ought to keep at least into their late teens but most do not these days. I yearn for those simpler days when things were indeed, "Deader than a doornail" and not the dead and deadly, gory, and bloody state that people, animals, and things find themselves in today.
How many of you remember the days when things were, "Deader than a doornail?"
And now the real story. I never realized there was one.
DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
[Q] From Clyde W Hathaway: How about dead as a doornail?
[A] This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeares Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.
But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Could it be because of the repetition of sounds, and the much better rhythm of the phrase compared with the version without door? Almost certainly the euphony has caused the phrase to survive longer than the alternatives Ive quoted. But could there something special about a doornail?
The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.
But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it cant be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you cant use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because theyd been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether its right or not we will probably never know.
