It might come as a shock but not everything on the net is true. A lot, in fact, is disinformation if not outright nonsense. Worse, it’s deliberately designed to fool and I’ve often been caught out. This is why I want to share my experience and forewarn you of the dangers of gullibility.
Last week, my cousin Lakshman sent me an amusing set of etymological explanations of English phrases. Each was supposed to date back to life in England in the 1500s. In fact, the purported antiquity added to its verisimilitude. I thought it was a real winner.
One of the phrases was the saying ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’. This is the origin offered: “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 animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’.”
More amusing was the explanation given for the phrase ‘dead ringer’: “England is old and small and the local folk started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and take the bones to a ‘bone-house’ and re-use the grave.
{{/usCountry}}More amusing was the explanation given for the phrase ‘dead ringer’: “England is old and small and the local folk started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and take the bones to a ‘bone-house’ and re-use the grave.
{{/usCountry}}When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks inside and they realised they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string to 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 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’.”
I swallowed these stories hook, line and sinker. Within minutes I forwarded Lakshman’s email to a host of others including my cousin Bharat in New York. The next morning I found two quick responses from Bhartu. The first said “unbelievable!”. I assumed he meant it as praise — an abbreviation of the phrase ‘unbelievable but true’. The second, however, made me think again. It said “see this too”. When I did I realised what was up.
Bhartu’s second email directed me to a site called www.phrases.org.uk. There I found a reference to a page entitled ‘The Nonsense Nine’. On accessing it I discovered that ‘Life in the 1500s’, the basis of Lakshman’s email, was pure and simple baloney. In fact, sheer fantasy.
For example, ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ couldn’t possibly have anything to do with animals in thatched roofs. “For them to have slipped off when it rained they would have needed to be on the outside — hardly the place an animal would head for shelter from bad weather”.
So what was the origin of this interesting description? “This is just a nice descriptive turn of phrase which doesn’t relate to any particular event or practice.” In fact, there are several similar phrases in English with nondescript origins. For instance, ‘it’s raining stair-rods’ and ‘it’s raining like pitchforks’.
And what about ‘dead ringer’? Sadly, it has nothing to do with the colourful origin I recounted earlier. The truth is rather prosaic. “A ringer is a horse substituted for another of similar appearance in order to defraud the bookies.” So that’s ‘ringer’; what about ‘dead’? Here the word is used in the sense of ‘dead heat’, ‘dead certain’ or ‘dead centre’, which makes ‘dead ringer’ an exact copy, a perfect duplicate.
In fact, Bhartu’s site rubbished a few other false notions about the origin of words. For instance, ‘posh’ is not derived from ‘port out, starboard home’ nor is ‘golf’ an acronym for ‘gentlemen only, ladies forbidden’. Posh predates the P & O by several decades whilst golf stretches back to at least 1457 and used to be spelt variously as goff, gowf, goif and gof, all of which proves the acronym is accidental.
Also, ‘the full Monty’ has nothing to do with a state of total undress. In fact, it’s the precise opposite. It’s being dressed in the full rig made available by the tailoring house of Montague Burton. ‘The full Monty’ is a three-piece suit with waistcoat, usually worn for a wedding!
The only thing that hasn’t as yet been disproved is the origin of the acronym derived from the phrase ‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge’. That was an early pilgrim father’s offence. Can you guess the word?