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December 11, 2003
Correction
Last month, I ran an article about weird history. One of the sections claims the etymology of the phrase "dead ringer" comes from the burial customs in England:
England is old and small and the local folks 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."
Now I know that all you readers understand that it was humorous but all the same I have to correct my post because someone with far more knowledge than I has explained it on the air. My wife thought that maybe he had read my post but actually I think it was circulating the net anyway. Kel is a great guy, an author, news reader / disk jockey and he had this to say:
Dead ringer
A dead ringer is a "look alike" and the expression began life in horse racing circles. I am explaining this because there is a nonsense explanation circulating on the web that involves strings running from coffins to bells above ground - so that supposedly "dead" people who regain consciousness can ring for help. "Ringer" has been a slang term for a horse substituted for another since the 1890s. It comes from an old confidence trick in which counterfeiters substituted valueless brass rings for precious gold rings. And the adjective "dead" is simply an intensifier - denoting "absolute" or "complete" as in "dead right" or "dead certainty". The nonsense explanation that continues to run around on emails fails to even explain how the expression "dead ringer" came to mean what it does today. It is a piece of "folk etymology" (or, as the linguists would say, a load of old rope) - don't believe a word of it!
You can find more of his WordWatch series online at the ABC NewsRadio site.
Out of interest, I was given a copy of The Aussie Bible (by Kel) for Christmas. Looks like a great read. You can see some of it on-line (just click on that link).
Posted by Ozguru at December 11, 2003 01:12 PM
Comments
Posted by: Kathy K at December 11, 2003 01:12 PM
