Dead as a Doornail.....

NO! It's not the chickens! My children pray CONSTANTLY for those chickens!

I have started reading Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol" to the kids at bedtime. My friend, Kristine, let us borrow her BEAUTIFULLY illustrated copy. (Illustrations by P.J. Lynch.....gonna get my own copy someday!) Anyhow, if you have read the story, on page one it says "Old Marley was as dead as a doornail." Well, first my kids started to giggle because "there are no nails in doors!" Sure enough! Our door has no nails! So I explained it was just a phrase. Then they asked what it meant. (See why it takes so long to get thru a book?) Anyhow, we googled it....like we do everything else.....here is what we found:

In The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, a correspondent points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know.

Anyhow, that was pretty interesting to all of us! I know we asked that question at book club when we discussed the book, too! So maybe tonight I can get thru some pages without explaining things I DON'T know! We might have to have the laptop sitting next to us on the bed for quick googling!