“Cold Enough To Freeze The Balls Off Of A Brass Monkey”: WotW

Okay, “Cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey” isn’t a “word”, in the strictest sense of the word, but it is composed of words, and is one of my favorite expression to boot.  One says “whoo, it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey” when it is, in fact, very cold.

This phrase is one of the reasons I like Winter (and there are so very few); I get to drop this delightful idiom and draw shocked or beleaguered glances from my customers at the Kwik Stop – and when they are curious enough to ask, I am more than happy to give them a moderately well rehearsed explanation of this curious nautical phrase.  That explanation goes something like this.

Back in the days when people still used old sailing ships and naval battles were commonplace, the ship-to-ship weapon of choice was the black powder cannon.  Traditional cannons need a couple of things to fire, not the least of which are black powder and cannon balls.  On most vessels, both were kept in the appropriately named “powder room”.
For what ought to be obvious reasons, it wouldn’t have done to have the sods firing the cannons running up and down to the powder room for a new cask of powder or the next ball in the middle of a tilted confrontation; most ships employed young adolescent men to do the job for the gun-men.  These boys often got covered in the sooty residue of the powder they carried, and would turn black from head to foot before a day was through; they came to be known as powder monkeys through virtue of their stature and their filthiness.
Powder monkeys were also responsible for bringing cannon balls on deck.  Since carrying just one ball at a time was inefficient, the monkeys used metal trays made of brass, which was the metal of choice because it was both light and strong.
Now, as you may or may not know, Brass contracts when exposed to cold temperatures; as you may or may not also know, winter on the high seas gets really fucking cold.  Once water is hot or cold, it tends to want to stay that way, making general plummets in overall regional temperature slow-going, but intense and long-lasting.  Add that to the fact that winds on the open water are typically severe and unimpeded by any sort of breaks, and you have the recipe for a frozen-ass sailor in a winter storm.  After awhile, enough such sailors observed the phenomena of equally frozen powder monkeys with cannonballs spilling off of their shrinking brass trays – which were called Brass Monkeys by association with those that carried them –  that the phrase “it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey” was born and quickly disseminated into the body of common nautical vernacular.

As always, thanks for reading
Mike

Munchausen’s Syndrome: WotW

Munchausen’s Syndrome is a medical condition.  Individuals afflicted with Munchausen’s Syndrome are addicted to medical care – they fabricate conditions and in many cases poison or injure themselves to emulate symptoms of diseases or afflictions; all to convince hospital personnel to take them in and care for them.  Munchausen’s sufferers can be extremely knowledgeable, and devious in their ruses.  Often, Munchausen’s Syndrome develops in persons who were frequently hospitalized, or spent great amounts of time in hospitals in their youth – it is also common in those with failed medical aspirations.

The Syndrome was named in 1951 by a doctor named Richard Asher, who described the bombastic lies espoused by patients with Munchausen’s as being “… like the famous Baron von Munchausen”.  Munchausen, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen – to be particular – was a German military officer in the latter half of the 1700s; and also a braggart famous for his over-the-top, often impossible tales of his personal exploits and adventures..

P.S.  My apologies for the late update – I’ve been binge-playing Terraria this week

La Petite Mort

The French have a phrase, La Petite Mort, literally, The Little Death.  While the phrase sometimes refers to a person’s reaction to trauma or tragedy, a la “they ‘died a little’ on the inside”, and at least one thinker and notable literary scholar has asserted that La Petite Mort is an appropriate way to describe the spiritual climax which should accompany the completion of a great work of literature; most often the phrase is used in reference to sexual climax, orgasm, or the euphoric moments which follow it.  Lingual/Cultural examinations and Freudian analyses aside, this is all I really have to say about this particular phrase…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=373V0vJNN0M

Still Living Relations Include…

I was perusing the Newspapers at work the other day to kill some time, and ended up checking out the Obituaries.  I wasn’t particularly interested by any of them, but I did have a thought when I noticed a pattern.  Almost every entry included, at some point, the words “survived by”; I cracked open and checked out the same section of a few other papers and saw that it was a pretty widespread thing.  Thinking back through my, admittedly vague, memories, I realized that this had been the case for years – it wasn’t a recent thing at all.  Now, I realize that “survived by” is traditional and well-established obit. vernacular, but I have to say it seems out of touch with the times.
By my estimation, in the modern English, “Survived” is not a flattering way to describe your relationship with someone.  The connotations of ‘survive’ are, generally, negative; you “survive” being lost in the wilderness for a month, you “survive” Christmas with you in-laws, you “survive” Nebraskaland days.  Generally, you do not “survive” a person, not one you like anyways – saying so seems to indicate that they were a consistently taxing, stress-inducing, or despicable person who you were forced to, for whatever reason, spend more time around than you would have preferred (depending on how you get along with your kin-folk you might say you “survive” family reunions).
Newspaper editors of America, think about coming up with a new way of saying “still living relations”.

PS, for Shirley, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLLSqpYyPD8

As always, thanks for reading,
Mike.