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yErMoTH3r

By yErMoTH3r, GC Founder
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yErMoTH3r Newbie

yErMoTH3r

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yErMoTH3r
yErMoTH3r
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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, 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."

 

 

Anyone? OG playaas should get it quite quickly.

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Zap Newbie

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You may not be pleased to hear that all this is complete and utter hogwash, just like the rest of the article. It's an example of a fascinating process (that is, from a sociolinguistic perspective) in which people actively seek out stories to explain phrases, not really caring whether they are true, just that they are psychologically satisfying. As a result, they are powerful memes, strongly resisting refutation. But World Wide Words is renowned as the home of lost causes, so I'll give it a go. Saved by the bell is actually boxing slang, dating from the 1930s. A contestant being counted out might be saved by the ringing of the bell for the end of the round, giving him a minute to recover. Graveyard shift is an evocative term for the night shift between about midnight and eight in the morning, when - no matter how often you've worked it - your skin is clammy, there's sand behind your eyeballs, and the world is creepily silent, like the graveyard (sailors similarly know the graveyard watch, the midnight to four a.m. stint). The phrase dates only from the early years of the twentieth century. The third phrase - dead ringer - dates from roughly the same period or perhaps a decade or two earlier. In that form, the word is US slang, dating from the latter part of the last century, originally in connection with horse racing. A horse of better class than that allowed was entered fraudulently into a race, with bets being placed on it by those in the know. The word has spread its associations more widely since, and can now refer to anything which has been tampered with in order to deceive, such as a motor vehicle. In this sense it is now common in Britain as well as the US, which has nicely returned the word to its source, because the idea of a fraudulent substitution is originally from the British English verb to ring. It dates from the early nineteenth century and is an abbreviation of the older to ring the changes, originally from bell-ringing, but used to indicate that something inferior has been substituted. The Australian term ring-in, meaning much the same as ringer, comes from the same source. The Australian sense of ringer, for the top gun or best-performing shearer in a shed, comes originally from a much older English dialect word meaning something outstanding or superlative. And dead ringer, another common form meaning a perfect likeness, is just ringer with the intensifier dead added.

 

So none of these expressions has anything to do with the burying of bodies.

 

So there :P

 

My source: http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-sav1.htm

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