I had alwas thought that “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” was a vulgar expression. I heard a talk show host in NH saying it was that cold where he was and No the expression is not vulgur but goes back to the 1800’s.
Do you know the meaning without looking it up?
Don’t peek!
http://www.essex1.com/people/jrfrienz/cannonbl.htm
The Word Detective gives a different origin.
Not true, according to Snopes . When you think about it, if you’re on a ship that quite naturally rolls with the waves, how are you going to store your cannonballs? Not in a pyramid on deck.
I’ve read the debunkings, so I see that the ship’s canon explanation is probably false… but does anyone know the truth? The phrase has been around for a while, so if not the canon ball holder then what was it based on?
From this site:
Kind of unrelated, but funny.
One of the pro hockey teams that used to visit Chicago to play the Blackhawks had a prank they would pull when they were in town. There’s a big horse statue in Grant Park, they would sneak up there in the middle of the night and paint the horse’s ball florescent orange. The next day they would come down and take pictures of the unfortunate city worker that had to climb up there and rub the paint off the statue.
They were finally caught and arrested after several successful nights of hijinks.
When I read the title, I finished it off with “A Brass monkey” but the key here is I had just heard it. I’ve never heard that phrase before today, I was walking back from class here on campus and my friend commented that that was how cold it was, and I just laughed thinking he made it up.
But now I know, he’s not as cool as I thought he was. Thanks for shattering that dream…
See, and that’s what I thought this thread was going to be, a fill in the blank exercise, e.g. “Cold enough to freeze a horse’s flourescent orange balls off”.
Very true, though this silly story seems to have surprising appeal. More than a few normally sensible people have insisted to me that it must be so, and scoffed at the debunkings.
Just for fun, I worked out what would happen in the way of shrinkage with decreasing temperature. Assume iron shot piled on a brass base that’s a meter square. Assume the temperature drops from 40 C (rather hot) to minus 40 C (savagely cold). Relative to the iron shot, the brass base will have shrunk by just over half a millimeter - scarcely enough to make any difference at all.