I recently received an e-mail that has been passed around the office entitled “Where did Piss Poor come from?”. The email contains several common phrases or saying from the 1500s and gives a brief history of how they came to be. I’m condensing it so they can all fit in one post. Any truth to some of these?
-“Piss Poor”
-Tanners used to use urine to tan skins, families who sold urine to the tannery to get by were deemed “piss poor”
-People who “Didn’t have a pot to piss in”
-See above, but families who were so hard up they could not buy a pot to bring urine to the tannery.
-Brides carrying a bouquet of flowers
-People often were only able to bathe once a year, brides carried the flowers to hide any unpleasant odors.
-“Raining cats and dogs”
-Animals stayed up in the house’s thatched roofing to stay warm. When it rained it would get slippery and they would fall off - hence the term.
-Canopy beds
-All these raining animals (and bugs/smaller pests) raining down led to people hanging a sheet over beds with big corner posts
-“Dirt Poor”
-Refers to families that only had dirt floors in their houses.
-Threshold
-Wealthy families with slate floors placed thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As more an more was added it would begin to slip outside when the door was opened. So a piece of wood was placed in the entryway to keep the straw inside.
-“Bring home the bacon”
-Families would hang their bacon strips as a sign of wealth, that the man could “bring home the bacon”
-“Graveyard shift” “Saved by the bell” “Dead ringer”
-When towns started to run out of graves, they reused them and found scratch marks on the insides of some coffins meaning the person was buried alive. They would then tie a string to the wrist of the corpse up to the ground and tied it to a bell. Someone was posted in the cemetery every night (graveyard shift) to listen for any ringing bells.
I’m fairly positive “saved by the bell” comes from boxing (or sports in general), yes.
While scratch marks on coffin doors are not unheard of, they were never that common, nor was the general public aware of them (undertakers were, because they often dug up old bones to make room for new ones, but undertakers tend to have few friends ).
The bridal bouquet has nothing to do with bad smells, it’s just a symbol of spring, fertility, that sort of thing. Basically it means the newly-weds are going to fuck a lot.
Canopy beds were never meant to prevent falling dogs - only the nobles had them and they sure as heck didn’t live in thatched huts. They were on the contrary meant just to be pretty, to prove you could afford useless pretty things, and in the case of fully curtained beds both an additional barrier against the cold and an illusion of privacy/secrecy about whose wife you were fucking.
Re: dirt poor, *everyone *had “just a dirt floor” on the ground floor, often sprinkled with sawdust or straw for when the rain seeped in. Stone or wooden floors were pretty much the exclusive dominion of the filthy rich.
I don’t have any actual etymology for “bringing home the bacon”, but I’m pretty confident it had nothing to do with any actual bacon. It just means “the one who pays for the family’s food”.
canopy beds were to hold heat in to keep the sleepers warmer in an era when there was no central heating, and there may not even be any fireplace in the room.
According to Pannati in Browsers Book Of Beginnings and Extraordinary Origins Of Everyday Things, canopy beds originated as mesh tents over the bed to keep out bugs. I think he traces them as far back as ancient Egypt.
And while bacon is hung (as are hams, and many meats), that is part of the curing/preserving process, not as a ‘display of wealth’. In fact, they are usually hung up inside an enclosed smokehouse – nobody could tell if your smokehouse contained a wealth of meat, or if it was near empty!
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