WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?????

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Countryside : One Thread

Thanks for the great comments. We are haveing a ice storm in south east Kansas. Trees are coming down, I have our generator on stand by thanks to y2k.

England is an ancient but relatively small land, and they started running out of places to bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and would empty the bones and reuse the grave. In reopening the coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside. They realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string to the person's wrist and put it through a hole drilled in the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone had to sit out in the grave yard all night to listen for the bell. Hence the "graveyard shift" and they would know if someone was "saved by the bell" or was a "dead ringer." Little tidbits from the ancient past that are interesting but really meant something in days long past.

Happy Future, jim

-- Jim Raymond (jimr@terraworld.net), January 30, 2002

Answers

According to Word Origins, http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorg.htm#Graveyard : This term for a late-night work shift dates to around the turn of the 20th century. The nautical term graveyard watch appears in 1895. 1907 sees the move to land-based industry and the word shift added in place of watch. Both terms are American in origin. The term does not date to the 16th century as is claimed in the Internet lore title Life in the 1500s. Nor does it have anything to do with men stationed in graveyards listening for those accidentally buried alive to ring bells in their coffins to alert others that they are alive, nor is it a reference to medical students robbing graves in search of cadavers. Instead, the term simply evokes the desolation and loneliness of late-night work.

-- BC (desertdweller44@yahoo.com), January 30, 2002.

The story about burying alive that I find most interesting is the one of the true engineer who asked the question "Is the desire to dig up live burials or is the intention to not bury a living person?" and he outfitted the caskets he manufactured with a spike that pierced the heart of the corpse as the lid was closed. He probably also got promoted to middle management :>)

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), January 30, 2002.

On the subject of "death"...I read that the term "wake" originated in 14th or 15th century Great Britain. When the men would visit the pubs, the ale or alcohol was served in containers that had a bad reaction to the alcohol. When these drinkers walked home, sometimes they would pass out on the side of the road where their friends or family would find them. They were taken home, placed on a table and folks would sit around waiting to see if they would "wake" up! Some did and some didn't!

-- Marcia (HrMr@webtv.net), January 30, 2002.

Once again, from www.snopes2.com on debunking this (and other) urban myths:

Since England is so old and small they started running out of places to bury people. So they started digging up some coffins and would take their bones to a house and re-use the grave. Burying the dead in previously-used graves happened with some frequency throughout Europe, both before, during, and after the 1600s. It didn't have to do with any particular country being too small to hold all the dead bodies, though -- it had to do with the shortage of space in established cemeteries. The family of the deceased would habitually look to inter the loved one in the graveyard attached to their parish and, like any other piece of land, graveyards were finite -- they could only be used to house so many before they filled up and older tenants had to be moved out.

Sometimes remains were dug up, and sometimes what was left was pushed aside, with the newcomer loaded in on top of whoever was already there. Most folks accepted this practice, provided the old bones remained near the church. When bones were disinterred bones, they were taken to a charnel house, in a process termed second burial.

English common law states that a grave is held only temporarily (not owned) and its use terminated "with the dissolution of the body." Grave inhabitants are granted "the right of appropriation of the soil to the body interred therein until its remains shall have so mingled with the earth as to have destroyed its identity." In other words, once you're bones, you've lost your rights.

Modern cemeteries in many countries routinely rent graves for two to thirty years. At the end of that period, the bones are disinterred and reburied in accordance with that country's cemetery laws. Vancouver, BC, successfully uses a 30-year-renewable lease for its graves. In London, England, the wealthy have for many years obtained 99-year leases on their graves in prestigious cemetaries. (Graves for purchase, though, are scarce.)

They started opening these coffins and found some had scratch marks on the inside. One out of 25 coffins were that way . . . Scratch marks have been found on the inside of some coffins and tombs. Our Buried Alive page details some cases of this. Such marks, however, were a relatively rare find, certainly nothing on a level even remotely approaching the "one out of 25" figure given in the e- mail.

. . . and they realized they had still been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on their wrist and lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Premature burial signalling devices only came into fashion in the 19th century; they weren't around in the 15th. Some of these 19th century coffins blew whistles and raised flags if the inhabitant awoke from his dirt nap. (Once again, our Buried Alive page provides information about a number of these devices, including ones available in modern times.)

That is how the saying "graveyard shift" was made. The earliest documented use of the phrase graveyard shift comes from a 1907 Collier's Magazine. However, graveyard watch was noted in 1895, with that term referring to a shipboard watch beginning at midnight and lasting usually four hours.

If the bell would ring they would know that someone was "saved by the bell" or he was a "dead ringer". Saved by the bell is a 1930s term from the world of boxing, where a beleaguered fighter being counted out would have his fate delayed by the ringing of the bell to signify the end of the round. Need we mention that although fisticuffs were around in the 1500s, the practice of ringing a bell to end a round wasn't?

Likewise, dead ringer has nothing to do with the prematurely buried signalling their predicament to those still above ground -- the term means an exact double, not someone buried alive. Dead ringer was first used in the late 19th century, with ringer referring to someone's physical double and dead meaning "absolute" (as in dead heat and dead right).

A ringer was a better horse swapped into a race in place of a nag. These horses would have to resemble each other well enough to fool the naked eye, hence how the term came to mean an exact double.

To sum up, though it's entertaining to toy with mental images of cats and dogs falling through thatch roofs and shudder deliciously over the thought of our forebearers dining off wooden platters that had worms waving out of them, that's about as far as one should take this craziness. No matter how many inboxes this popular e-mail has landed in, it never once enlightened anyone. Indeed, it probably left more than a few looking like utter fools when they tried to pass this "knowledge" along to friends better versed in phrase origins.

As always, the bottom line is to take such missives with a grain of salt.

-----------------------

Two things I'll add:

I have been in England and believe me they are no where near running out of places for new cemeteries. In church yards surrounded by houses, yes, but certainly not in the countryside.

Think of the logistics of tying a cord to the hand of a corpse, bringing it through the lid of a coffin, through several feet of soil, then to a bell. It might be pulled slowly, but there wouldn't be the whiplash action required to ring a bell. Besides, how long would the air in the coffin last even if only shallow breathes were being taken.

I speculate as an assignment some student was given the task to tie as many old sayings as possible into a story, even they had no elements of fact. This was later picked up as a e-mail and distributed. What is the saying about a lie being told often enough becoming the truth?



-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), January 30, 2002.


Wasn't it Edgar Allan Poe that was so terrified that he would be buried alive, that he designed his own casket? I can't remember what the design was. Then I heard that he died in a different country and didn't get to use the casket after all.

-- cowgirlone in OK (cowgirlone47@hotmail.com), January 30, 2002.


On graveyards and such, has anyone heard that the origin of "no man land" originated in conjunction with where hanged persons were buried in English cemeteries, something in relation to a certain wall of the cemetery? I’m pretty sure that it predates the common battle field usage.

-- BC (desertdweller44@yahoo.com), January 30, 2002.

I don't know where EAP died, but he is buried in Boston in an ordinary churchyard grave. He died in 1849 at the age of 40. Can't remember the movie, but it starred Vincent Price, and I believe was based on a book or story by Poe. The character was so afraid of being buried alive he had a vault built with numerous methods of announcing he was alive. When it came time to use them, none worked. Anyone remember the name of the movie?

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), January 30, 2002.

BC:

According to a reference I have, "No man's land as used during the World War was merely a new application of an old term. In the fourteenth century no man's land was a piece of waste ground just outside the walls of London which was often used for executions."

Hard to believe Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe 283 years ago (1719), but the term is used in that novel.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), January 30, 2002.


http://www.snopes2.com/horrors/gruesome/buried.htm notes on being buried alive: Edgar Allen Poe's macabre short stories, most notably "Premature Burial," On Iona, in the sixth century, one of St. Columba's monks, Oran, was dug up the day after his burial and found to be alive. Legend has it when he told his fellows he had seen heaven and hell, he was promptly dispatched and re-interred on grounds of heresy. One of the most famous of such cases is that of Anne Greene who, after being hanged for a felony on 14 December 1650, was sent to the anatomy hall to be used for dissection. She awoke and lived on for many years afterwards. In 1995 a $5,000 Italian casket equipped with call-for-help ability and survival kit went on sale. Akin to bleeping devices which alert relatives to an elderly family member's being in trouble, this casket is equipped with a beeper which will sound a similar emergency signal. The coffins are also fitted with a two-way microphone/speaker to enable communication between the occupant and someone outside, and a kit which includes a torch, a small oxygen tank, a sensor to detect a person's heartbeat, and even a heart stimulator.

-- BC (desertdweller44@yahoo.com), January 30, 2002.

I like Jim's version better :)

-- Sue (sulandherb@aol.com), January 30, 2002.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ