Freezing balls off a brass monkey

[brossa]

Colder than a gutshot bitch wolf dog with nine suckling pups pulling a #4 trap up a hill in the dead of winter in the middle of a snowstorm with a mouthful of porcupine quills.

-Tom Waits

[DesertDog]

@Gedd

It depends on why you are trapping them. If you want it alive you use Swiss cheese, if you just want the unicorn for the sparkly rainbow meat you use peanut butter.

According to this site it’s Irish nuns easing geriatric unicorns’ passage. No trapping involved.

[ElvisL1ves]

ISTR a passage from Tom Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

It’s colder than the nipple on a witch’s tit,
Colder than a bucket full of penguin shit,
Colder than the hairs on a polar bear’s ass,
Colder than the frost on a champagne glass.

No, I’m not looking it up.

[Tammi_Terrell]

@RealityChuck

It would seem most likely that a brass monkey was a monkey statuette made of brass. The monkey was part of the Chinese zodiac and making a statuette out of brass would be a simple good luck charm. Other cultures also made statues of monkeys out of brass.

I guess that’s the prevailing theory, but a notation in the OED about “monkey” bears mention, if only because of the curious 17th-century connection to cannons.

†13. A kind of gun or cannon; (perh.) = drake n.1 3. Obs.

1650 Articles Rendition Edenb.-Castle 4, 28 Short Brasse Munkeys alias Dogs. 10 Iron Munkeys.

1663 J. Heath Flagellum (1672) 103 Twenty-eight Brass Drakes called Monkeys.

Still, that’s quite a delay between the first recorded uses of “brasse munkeys” (or monkeys made of brass) and a phrase first recorded in the first half of the 19th century.

Of course, it’s possible that someone (at some recent point) wondering about the origin of the expression became aware of the word’s connection with cannons and crafted a story about cannonball holders to try to dupe the rest of us.

@RealityChuck

The OED gives the first cite of the phrase from Herman Melville’s Omoo:

Originally Posted by OED
1847 H. Melville Omoo liii. 207 Under a sun which, as Shorty said, ‘was hot enough to melt the nose hoff a brass monkey’.

Note the difference, though – it’s an indication of heat, not cold. Melville uses “nose” instead of “balls.”

For what it’s worth, an 1838 use of the expression involves cold, not heat.

Old Knites was as cool as a cucumber, and would have been so independent of the weather, which was cold enough to freeze the nose off of a brass monkey.

(From “Stray Leaves from a Straggler’s Note Book: A Heroic Woman and a Womanish Hero,” The Morning Herald [New York, New York], 30 May 1838, p. 2.)

@RealityChuck

This probably is a bowdlerization of the original phrase, but it’s clear that he’s referring to a literal representation of a monkey.

Probably so. Still, for a connection to brass statuettes of monkeys (as good luck charms) to be more convincing, it would be helpful to find bits of writing involving brass representations of simians that predate the appearance of the larger “brass monkey” expression.

– Tammi Terrell