Here is the essence of an amazing article on the origins of familiar English phrases written William Poulu . Most people in England get married in June because that was when they took their yearly bath. Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide their body odour. The order of taking that one yearly bath went from the man of the house to the last being the babies. Needless to say, the water was very dirty by then. Leading to the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
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 cats, dogs, mice etc climbed up there. When it rained, the straw would become slippery and the animals would slip and fall off the roof.- Hence the phrase, “It’s raining cats and dogs”.
The floor of poor people’s houses was dirt. Leading to the phrase, “dirt poor”. The slightly more wealthy people put straw on their floors, which, over time piled up into “thresh”. They would then put a piece of wood across the base of the doorway to hold in the ‘thresh’. This became known as a ‘thresh hold”.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burned bottom of the bread. The family ate the middle of the bread and guests ate the upper crust. A phase that is now used to describe the wealthy.
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination of lead and alcohol would, sometimes knock the imbibers out for a day or two. The imbiber would be laid out on the kitchen table and prepared for burial. The family would gather round and eat and drink and wait to see if the person would wake up, creating the custom of, “holding a wake” before burial.
Urine was used to tan hides. Families would pee in a pot and sell the urine to a local tannery. Those who were too poor to own a pot were called people, “who did not have a pot to piss in.”
England is old and small and, in the Middle Ages, they were running out of burial sites. People started digging up old coffins to reuse the site. Scratch marks were noticed inside some of the coffins, indicating that these people had been buried alive.. They decided to attach a string to the hand of corpses and run it up to the surface, where it was attached to a bell. Someone would sit by the grave on the first night after burial to listen, in case the bell rang. This was called the “graveyard shift” and someone might be “saved by the bell”.
There we go, a small voyage into linguistic history. We have different problems today but, overall, I remain grateful to be alive in the 21st century and hope that we can improve the wellbeing of all Canadians in the near future. Bring on the Federal and Provincial elections..
