WHY DO WE SAY—?

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 125, 30 May 1933, Page 6

WHY DO WE SAY—?

"DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL. ,,

"Marley was dead," and Dickens goes on, "as dead as a door nail. Mind!' I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead ,about a door nail. I might have been inclined myself to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece if ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile." Aβ a matter of fact; the great novelist would not have committed an error if he had told us that Marley was as dead as a coffin nail, for that is another of the many similes used to show absolute death.

Absurd as it is to speak about degrees of death, the slang merchants have been very busy when there has arisen a question of death: At present we may be told that a person is "as dead as a herring," "as dead as Chelsea," or as charity, mutton, or Queen Anne. But we are no wiser than if told that he is dead, simply but definitely. "Dead as a door nail" is superior to other similes, not only in that it wae used by Shakespeare and Dickens, but because 'it is by far the oldest of such expressions. Itii use is noted as early as the middle of the fourteenth century, and in, "Piers Plowman" we have this form, and also "as dead as a door tree." In the first part of "Henry V 1.," Shakespeare, we read: "Come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a door nail, I pray God I may never eat grass more."

The words door nail should not be used to indicate any nail employed in the construction of a door, but the particular kind, very heavy and large-headed, which once adorned the tremendous doors of mansions and castles in England. It was also used with reference to the ponderous stud or lump of iron on which the knocker struck. From this latter use arose the idea that a door nail was particularly dead, which would certainly be the case with any human being subject to such hammering on the head. Preference for a coffin nail shows ignorance of the, origin of the earlier phrase.