Dead as a Doornail

Sometime we use really strange idioms in our speech.

"Raining cats and dogs"

"At the drop of a hat"

"Barking up the wrong tree"

"Elvis has left the building"

Some of these make me smile.  

I've heard about the cats and dogs all of my life,

not realizing it had some meaning to those

who had thatched roofs.

Animals grazed on the roof,

and when it became wet from a heavy rain, 

guess what fell through the roof...

More may be found here:  http://www.smart-words.org/quotes-sayings/idioms-meaning.html

So, let me bring this to the present

in the life of a genealogist.

I absolutely love barns.

This is a cantilever barn located in Cades Cove, Sevier, Tennessee.

You can see that the upper portion is larger than its base.

Livestock would be kept below, and hay would be stored above.

Animals and farm implements could be kept dry under the eaves.

Another cantilever barn at the Museum of Appalachia in Clinton, TN.

Many of us may remember the Mail Pouch Tobacco sign on the sides of old barns.  There is one located not far from me.

I particularly remember the many tobacco barns in Kentucky.

My kinfolk there were tobacco farmers.

It was hard work setting out the tender plants each spring, thinning them, stripping them, then hanging them out to try before being taken to the tobacco warehouse for purchase.

But, there has always been one barn that was my favorite.

It belonged to my sister Jean, and her husband Earl.

And, I can't find a single one of the photos I ever took of it.

They'll show up.

Their barn was built in 1846.

It withstood windstorms, tornadoes, lightning strikes, 

and just about everything else you could think of.

I used to play in the hayloft when I was a young girl.

I milked a cow that switched her tail into my hair.

I saw many puppies born.

I have good memories of that barn.

Just last year, they decided to tear it down,

and sell the wood.

And, a part of me grieved.

But, I did ask Earl if he would gather me up some of the nails.

I have nails from 1846!

I was touching wood and nails that someone else touched

in 1846!

Some of those nails came out really good and straight.

And, some came out rather bent and useless.

Hence, they were dead as a doornail.

That is not a new phrase at all.

It was used as far back as 1350.

"This is old - at least 14th century. There's a reference to it in print in 1350, a translation by William Langland of the French poem Guillaume de Palerne:

"For but ich haue bote of mi bale I am ded as dorenayl."

William Shakespeare gave the line to Jack Cade in 

 King Henry VI, Part 2, 1592.

"Look on me well: I have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more."

And, sure enough, 

Charles Dickens use the phrase in A Christmas Carol:

"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

In times' past, the phrase was in use when building large doors, like the ones found in castles and manors.

The nail would be pounded in,

then the head would be hit rather askew

to hold it in tighter.

If the nail were ever pulled out to be used somewhere else,

it would useless.

For, it wasn't straight.

In the times of our ancestors,

all materials were important in building a cabin or a barn.

And, sometimes before moving on,

they would actually burn their homestead down

to retrieve the nails.

Nails were expensive,

and if you were moving to the frontier,

there may not be any place to purchase more.

So, they used the old ones...if they were still straight.

However, if they were bent and possibly 

couldn't be pounded out straight

like some of those above,

they were likely not useful at all.

Hence, they were "dead as a doornail."