I don’t know how to look it up, but I think you’ll find that “melt” meaning dissolve goes back centuries. Likewise, I imagine that saying “You won’t melt” to someone reluctant to go out in the rain was well established long before The Wizard of Oz came along.
Assuming that’s correct, I would say the the witch’s “I’m melting” line in the movie is more aligned with the decline/end of melt=dissolve in common usage, not the beginning of it. When I first saw Wizard as a kid, I didn’t understand why she was “melting” - there wasn’t any heat involved. I had never heard melt used that way. Nowadays, and throughout my 50+ years, common usage seems to be dissolve=dissolve, and melt=liquefy with heat - except for the lingering use brought up in the OP.
The story is Rain, Rain, Go Away, and the neighbors are the Sakkaros. For some reason I read it as being moralistic; as in, “don’t judge people too harshly for their eccentricities, they may have a damn good reason for doing what they do”. Childish I guess, but it seemed to be written for a young audience.
The last line of the bystanders before the Sakkaros melt is “Honestly, you would think they were made of sugar and afraid they would melt”.
The dunking stool was punishment for a gossip, not a witch.
For witches, you threw 'em in the water, as a test. If they sank, then they weren’t witches. However, if they floated, they were witches and were then burned at stake. So you can see how being accused of witchcraft could ruin your life.
You know, thinking back, I believe that KidScruffy is right, it was Sakkaro and not Sakharov. I don’t know if I still have the collection of stories, but I’ll search for it.
No, there are many records showing it was used on ‘witches’.
(Though it (or a similar device) was also sometimes used on other types of ‘uppity women’, such as gossips, scolds & prostitutes.)
I didn’t remember the last line word for word, but the general idea of it, and the descriptions of how they would seem to look at the sky with terror whenever a cloud passed by, have stuck with me. I think we read it sometime in elementary school. I did sort of enjoy the story; I guess I just always sort of thought there was some point I was missing.
The story was a political allegory. You will notice that the last name of the alien neighbors, “Sakkaro”, was similar (to Western ears) to a Japanese name. The Sakkaros represented Japanese immigrants to the USA who were doing their best to fit in to American society, but constantly living under the cloud of fear that their host country would one day see fit to persecute them. Finally they are destroyed by a dangerous element falling from the sky (representing the atomic bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The family, horrified at the painful death of their neighbours, represents the loss of innocence of post-World War II America shocked that their government would be capable of unleashing such death and destruction upon fellow living creatures.
She melted in the book, just as she did in the movie.
My great grandmother used to tell me I wouldn’t melt in the rain, and I know she never saw the movie, or read the book. (She couldn’t read, and was proud to say she’d never set foot in a movie theater. She died before we got a TV.)
Often the term “tin” was used for galvanized steel, as in the so-called tin can. If the tin coating wears away, as it well might in moveable joints, rust can grab hold. I’ve always though this was what the “Tin Man” was supposed to be made of, not literally tin.
In Baum’s original book, the character carried a hatchet and his entire body was heated and covered with a thin layer of lead and flux to prepare for work. He was the Tinned Woodsman.
You may want to look into the posibility of it referencing the use of sugar poured into clear sheets, and used as a glass substitute when glass was hard to come by.
I thought it was in a non-fiction book, that involved a European war. The people substituting sugar glass for real during a party, so they could keep up appearances. It didn’t last long, but the guests were gone before it liquefied. Any one wishing to search can. It was just a push into a direction that might produce something.
As a very short term solution dictated by vanity, it sounds plausible. I could see somebody living in the Weimar depression wasting food in order to seem like they were still wealthy.
