Originally published at: Where does the phrase "dead as a doornail" come from? | Boing Boing
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Humbug!
“Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
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Where does the phrase “dead as a doornail” come from?
I think someone found it in that bucket we kick when we die.
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Well, when was the last time you saw a live doornail, eh?
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I hate stupid videos without text alternatives, so I looked it up in Wiktionary instead:
One plausible explanation is that doors were built using only wood boards and hand-forged nails: the nails were long enough to dead nail the (vertical) wooden panels and (horizontal) stretcher boards securely together, so they would not easily pull apart. This was done by pounding the protruding point of the nail over and down into the wood. A nail that was bent in this fashion (and thus not easily pulled out) was said to be “dead”, thus dead as a doornail .
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I assume the bucket is located on the farm we are all destined to buy?
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It’s pretty old. I seem to remember it in Piers the Ploughman written in the 1300s.
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The narrator’s tone of voice is especially deadpan, too. Very apropos. Sounds a lot like Verbal Kint, actually.
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I hadn’t heard of “dead nailing”. The practice is what I always knew as clinching.
The planks on wood-canvas canoes are fastened to the ribs with copper or brass tacks clinched over on the inside, or sometimes riveted over copper roves (washers).
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Right before the tip was bent and the shank pounded sideways.
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Now I am wondering when is it appropriate to recycle coffin-nails…
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l.829: For James the gentile
Jugged in hise bokes,
That feith withouten the feet
Is right no thyng worthi,
And as deed as a dore-tree,
But if the dedes folwe.
Because James the gentile
Judged in his books
That faith without feat
Is rightly worth nothing
And as dead as a door-post
Except if deeds follow.
“Tree” also meant “wood”, “plank”, or “beam”, as it still does in modern Scandinavian languages. Norwegian Dette bordet er av tre = “This table is made of wood”
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Treenails (trunnels) are wooden pegs used to fasten wood together in timber framing and boat building. Often they are wedged to lock them in place, after which I suppose they could be called dead, since they can’t be reused.
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Why not? Who’s going to bend the nails from inside the coffin?
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So, from wence comes the term …as thick as two short planks?
Doornails are out of fashion. I prefer as dead as a maggot.
…Maggots are very commonly alive though. Like, every time you see a fly, it means there once was a live maggot that never become a dead maggot. It kind of makes for a weird simile, doesn’t it?
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So seems like the original phrase was quite literally about the difference between living and dead wood rather than metaphorically dead nails
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