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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> As a medieval reenactor, I can say for certain that the vast majority of 
> those are absolutely not true.
> 

The stories that rise up about the origin of terms and customs are almost as 
interesting as the terms and customs themselves.

It piqued my curiosity so I looked it up and the term "saved by the bell" 
first appears in print in the English language in 1893 in a newspaper account 
of 
a boxing match.

The bell with the cord going to the coffin, as it turns out, was a patended 
idea but there is no evidence that one was ever used by anyone.

The 'bell and coffin' story is often cited as an explanation of the term 
'dead ringer' and that too is baseless.  If you wanted to cheat in a horse 
race, 
you found a horse that was better or worse than the one you intended to bet 
for 
or against and substituted it for the named horse.  Doing so was called 
"ringing" the horse, and a horse that was an exact match was a 'dead ringer' 
much 
as 'dead accurate' 'dead on target' 'dead right'.  

My favorite fabricated etimology is that in order to assert that plantation 
slaves were so badly mistreated, they had to go to the fields before sunrise 
and cook their cornbread on their hoes and so came the term 'hoecake'.   Yet 
if 
anyone took the trouble to read any colonial literature, when the colonists 
of 
Pennsylvania adopted Indian food, they refered to it by its Indian name.   In 
the Algonquin language the word for bread made from corn is 'hokkek' and 
that's the way is was spelled until people forgot its origin and spelled it 
as 
they though it sounded, 'hoe cake'.
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