Write and Polish
  • Home
  • Services
  • News & Blog
  • Improving Your Writing
    • Preliminaries
    • Start Writing
    • Revision
    • And, Finally...
  • Links
  • Contact Us

How Cold Is It?

1/22/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
The United States' upper Midwest has been feeling the winter's chill over the last few days. Enough so that certain idioms and colloquialisms have been shared, in an attempt to describe or quantify just how cold it has been.

This, naturally, gets the Writers and Polishers to wondering at the source(s) of some of these phrases. Being that information has never been easier to acquire than in the Internet age, we looked into a couple of the more common. We now share our findings with you:

The poor brass monkey
Since 1857, the brass monkey has been afflicted by cold, such as would freeze his tail off. This was the first such recorded use,  in Before the Mast (by C.A. Abbey). Interestingly, exactly a decade prior, Herman Melville assigned a phrase to a character in Omoo asserting that "It was 'ot enough to melt the nose h'off a brass monkey." Variously, excessive heat or cold has been said to cost the poor brass monkey his ears, nose, whiskers, throat, tail or fur, as well as other, less appropriate bits of the monkey's anatomy, which first appear in the written record by the 1930s.


It should be noted that the brass monkeys in question are presumed, including by the generally recognized authority on word/phrase origins, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to be those small statues produced in China and Japan as tourist souvenirs beginning in the 19th century. There is an apocryphal attribution having to do with a stand on which canon balls are racked, but this story has a variety of problems which relegate it to the realm of quaint urban legend.
Picture
And, the witch's bosoms?

In the matter of using a witch's tit (or teat) as a yardstick for the cold, what's clear is what is not the colloquial source of the phrase. Contrary to popular belief that it is a vestige of witch-hunting centuries past, in which some stray bit of flesh could be used to convict a woman of consorting, and possibly engaging in unholy congress, with Old Scratch, the phrase first appears in the written record in <drumroll> 1932. 

Yes, you read that correctly. 

Again, the esteemed experts at the OED have been unable to turn up any use of the phrase prior to that year, when F. Van Wyck [pronounced "Wike"] Mason employed it in his novel, Spider House. While it is generally accepted that such terms are probably being used in conversation before someone writes them down, it nonetheless beggars belief that it could have existed for four or six or eight centuries without a surviving written reference prior to Mr. Mason. As such, it seems that it was coined by a person and with an intent now lost to memory, but in the relatively recent past, and probably as a straight-up metaphor.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Write and Polish Bloggers

    Christie Manussier, principal Writer and Polisher, is the usual news reporter. 

    Guest bloggers may comment as well, from time to time.

    Categories

    All
    Abbreviation
    Academic
    Acronym
    Adjective
    Adverb
    Anachronism
    Anagram
    Apostrophe
    Application
    Article
    Banished
    Biography
    Blend
    B.N.I.
    Boldface
    Brochure
    Bunnies
    Business
    Business Plan
    Capitalization
    Children's Literature
    Christmas
    Church
    Comma
    Common Mistakes
    Construction
    Contact Management
    Content
    Contest
    Cross-sell
    Databse
    Differentiators
    Donation
    Double Negative
    E-mail
    Entertainment
    Etymology
    Event Coordination
    File Format
    First Reference
    Flyer
    Fundraiser
    Giggles
    Gold Star
    Grammar Day
    Grant Proposal
    Haiku
    Health Care
    Homophones
    Hyphen
    Idiom
    Images
    Italics
    Law Firm
    Magazine
    Manual
    Marketing
    Maternity Leave
    Metaphor
    Myth
    News & Announcements
    Newsletter
    Non Profit
    Non-profit
    Noun
    Numbers
    Of Snakes And Presidents
    Parts Of Speech
    P.D.F.
    Plural
    Poetry
    Portmanteau
    Poster
    Powerpoint
    P.R.
    Preposition
    Press Release
    Projects
    Pronoun
    Proofreading & Editing
    Punctuation
    Quotation Marks
    Quotes
    Real Estate
    Recommended Reading
    Reflexive
    Research
    Resources
    Restaurant
    Retail
    R.F.P.
    R.I.P.
    Shakespeare
    Slideshow
    Social Media
    Spelling
    Style Manual
    Synonyms
    Syntax
    Template
    Tenses
    Testimonial
    Thesaurus
    Training Manual
    Translation
    Travel
    Twitter
    Underlining
    Verb
    Video
    Vocabulary
    Website
    Why The World Needs More Proofreaders
    Winter
    Word Of The Day
    Writers
    Writing Tip

    Archives

    March 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    May 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    August 2010
    July 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009
    August 2009
    July 2009
    June 2009
    May 2009
    April 2009
    March 2009
    February 2009
    January 2009
    December 2008
    November 2008
    February 2008
    January 1990

    RSS Feed

Write and Polish
Located in Racine, Wisconsin 
® Serving clients everywhere
 
We face the blank page, so you don't have to!
  • © 2009-2015 Write and Polish, all rights reserved
  • Design by DivTag Templates
  • Proudly powered by Weebly
    Follow Us