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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Life in the 1500's
  • Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:59:15 EDT



> 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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