[TheForge] Good ole days ?

[northwoods]

----- Original Message -----
From: "lama" <lama@huntbrothers.com>
To: "TheForge" <TheForge@mailman.qth.net>
Sent: February 17, 2002 12:24 AM
Subject: [TheForge] Good ole days ?



 Yah thanks for posting that dave. Just an observation though, it's all a
bunch of nonsense. I don't think even one of the diefinitions is correct.
Just another bit of internet nonsense that keeps floating around.


> The man  of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all
> the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children-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."

When the proverb "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water" or its
parallel proverbial expression "To throw the baby out with the bath water"
appear today in Anglo-American oral communication or in books, magazines,
newspapers, advertisements or cartoons, hardly anybody would surmise that
this common metaphorical phrase is actually of German origin and of
relatively recent use in the English language. It had its first written
occurrence in Thomas Murner's (1475-1537) versified satirical book
Narrenbeschw�rung (1512) which contains as its eighty-first short chapter
entitled "Das kindt mit dem bad v� schitten" (To throw the baby out with the
bath water) a treatise on fools who by trying to rid themselves of a bad
thing succeed in destroying whatever good there was as well. In seventy-six
rhymed lines the proverbial phrase is repeated three times as a folkloric
leitmotif, and there is also the first illustration of the expression as a
woodcut depicting quite literally a woman who is pouring her baby out with
the bath water.[1] Murner also cites the phrase repeatedly in later works
and this rather frequent use might be an indication that the proverbial
expression was already in oral currency towards the end of the fifteenth
century in Germany.

> 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 dogs, cats and other small animals(mice rats, and 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."

In Northern mythology the cat is supposed to have great influence on the
weather, and English sailors still say the cat has a gale of wind in her
tail when she is unusually frisky. Witches that rode upon the storms were
said to assume the form of cats; and the stormy northwest wind is called the
cat's nose in the Harz mountains even at the present day. The dog is a
signal of wind, like the wolf. Both animals were attendants of Odin, the
storm-god. In old German pictures the wind is figured as the "head of a dog
or wolf," from which blasts issue. The cat therefore symbolizes the
down-pouring of rain, and the dog the strong gusts of wind that accompany a
rainstorm; and a rain of "cats and dogs" is a heavy rain with wind.

> 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 really 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.

Thats pretty funny!!


> The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter
> when wet, so they spread thresh on the floor to help keep their
> footing.
> As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when
> you opened the door it would all start slipping outside.  A piece
> of wood was placed in the entranceway -- Hence, a "thresh hold."

There is no such thing as "thresh". It is a verb, not a noun. It means "to
trample or stamp on".



> Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination
> would sometimes knock them 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."

Thats pretty weak.


> 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, 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 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 term graveyard shift doesn't date before the early 20th century.
Dead ringer:The word "ringer" dates back to 1890 and was originally
horse-racing slang for a horse with a proven track record that was knowingly
substituted for a less qualified, untested horse. "Ringer" is now used as
slang for anything that has been tampered with or unfairly altered. The
"dead" in "dead ringer" is simply an intensifier, meaning "absolutely," and
since a "ringer" must resemble the thing it replaces, "dead ringer" has come
to mean something indistinguishable from another thing or person

> And that's the truth...
 YAH, RIGGGHHHHTT