The Tall Tale: England is old and small and they
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, one out of 25 coffins were found to have
scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying
people alive. So they thought 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."
The Facts: Snopes.com
rounds up many accounts of live burial, feared and real, including only
one instance of scratch marks purportedly discovered in a coffin lid.
The idea of a signaling system inside a coffin didn’t occur until the
late 19th century, when Count Michel de Karnice-Karnicki, a chamberlain
to the Tsar, after hearing a horrifying account of girl nearly buried
alive, patented a safety coffin. The slightest movement of the chest or
arms of the body inside the coffin would trigger a complex mechanism to
admit air into the coffin, ring a bell and wave a flag above.
But all that has nothing to do with the origin of the expression dead
ringer. Ringer is slang for a look-alike horse, athlete, etc.
fraudulently substituted for another in a competition or sporting event.
It comes from an earlier slang verb to ring or to ring the changes,
meaning to substitute one thing for another fraudulently and take the
more valuable item. (Ring the changes harkens back to “change-ringing”:
using a team of bell ringers to play tunes on church bells.) The ringer
was originally the person arranging the fraudulent swap; later it came
to mean the substituted competitor. Dead is used in the sense "absolute,
exact, complete," as in “dead ahead” or “dead right.” So a dead ringer
is an exact look-alike.
2. Saved by the bell
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The origin of saved by the bell is not in coffin contraptions or even
the ardent prayers of students to be spared of answering a tough
question by the clanging of the end-of-period bell. The classroom
meaning is an extension of the original source of the phrase: boxing. It
means to be saved from being counted out by the bell at the end of a
round, and is first documented in the early 20th century.
3. Graveyard shift
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The graveyard shift has nothing to with literal graveyards, just the
lonesome, uneasy feeling of working in the dark silence of the midnight
hours. The expression first appears in the late 19th century. In 1895,
the
New Albany Evening Tribune for May 15 has a story about coal mining that begins, “It was dismal enough to be on the graveyard shift…” On
August 17, 1906, Marshall, Michigan's
The Marshall Expounder,
in a piece entitled “Ghosts in Deep Mines,” says, “And of all
superstitions there are none more weird than those of the ‘graveyard’
shift…usually between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.” Sailors similarly had a
“graveyard watch,” usually from midnight to 4 a.m. According to Gershom
Bradford in
A Glossary of Sea Terms (1927), the watch was so
called “because of the number of disasters that occur at this time,” but
another source attributes the term to the silence throughout the ship.
4. Upper crust
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The Tall Tale: 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 "upper crust."
The Facts: An isolated source hints at such a custom. One of the first printed books on household management, John Russell’s
Boke of Nurture,
circa 1460, says (translated into modern English), “Take a loaf…and lay
[a trencher] before your lord; lay four trenchers four-square, and
another on the top. Take a loaf of light bread, pare the edges, cut the
upper crust for your lord.” It’s not clear whether the upper crust was
considered the tastiest nibble or the sturdiest substitute for a plate,
but such instructions have cropped up nowhere else. Over the centuries,
the phrase upper crust appears in reference to the earth’s surface,
bread and pies. But it’s not until the 19th century that we find it used
to mean upper class, so the connection with the apportioning of a loaf
is dubious.
In the 19th century, upper crust appears as a slang term for the human head or a hat. In 1826,
The Sporting Magazine
reported, “Tom completely tinkered his antagonist’s upper-crust.” Most
likely it’s simply the idea of the upper crust being the top that made
it a metaphor for the aristocracy. Here’s how Thomas Chandler Haliburton
put it in 1838's
The Clockmaker; or the sayings and doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville: “It was none o' your skim-milk parties, but superfine uppercrust real jam.”
5. Trench mouth
Photo of ulcerative necrotizing gingivitis, public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The Tall Tale: Most people did not have pewter
plates, but had trenchers, pieces of wood with the middle scooped out
like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale paysan bread which was
so old and hard that they could use them for quite some time. Trenchers
were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold got into the wood
and old bread. After eating off wormy moldy trenchers, one would get
"trench mouth."
The Facts: Trencher, from Anglo-Norman, is related to modern French
trancher,
to cut or slice. It appears in English in the 1300s meaning either a
knife; a flat piece of wood on which meat was sliced and served; a
platter of wood, metal or earthenware; or a slice of bread used as a
plate or platter.
Wooden carving boards can be breeding grounds for pathogens, but they
have nothing to do with the origin of the phrase trench mouth. One of
the earliest mentions of the term appears in the journal
Progressive Medicine
in 1917. If that date makes you think of World War I and trench
warfare, you’re right. Trench mouth is ulcerative gingivitis caused not
by worms or mold, but by bacteria, probably spread among troops in the
trenches when they shared water bottles.
6. Wake
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The Tall Tale: Lead cups were used to drink ale
or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock a person 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."
The Facts: The English could hold their ale in the
16th century. It was considered more healthful than water and was part
of daily life, even for breakfast. Strong liquor (except for brandy, “a
woman’s drink”) was not popular. Some people had pewter cups, which
contained lead, but lead poisoning is generally a gradual, cumulative
process. If anyone got knocked out from drinking mass quantities of ale
from a pewter cup, don’t blame the lead. Nevertheless, the practice in
many world societies of holding a wake for the dead arose at least
partly from the fear of burying them prematurely. In the British Isles,
the Christian wake, an all-night service of prayers for the dead, may
have been influenced by the Celtic pagan wake in which the corpse was
placed under a table on which liquor was provided for the watchers. Over
the years, both types of wakes degenerated into scenes of drunken
debauchery.
Image credit: getty images
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