Would you like to buy some water-front property in Arizona too? Though very cute, the story of the "brass monkey" coloquialism is absurd at best. Aside from the fact that cannon balls would have been held in place much more cheaply and easily with wood and no book has ever documented finding a "brass monkey" on a wreckage or the oxford dictionary having a description of such a device, the idea is obsurd. Warships never kept balls sitting around on deck, they much too valuable a commodity to take a chance on a rogue storm throwing them over. They were kept in storage below decks except when in combat, and on docked tourist attractions like when you go on the U.S.S. Constitution. The term "cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey" has much more innocuous representation in literature. Appearances of the coloquialism appear in the 19th century, and much of the monkey anatomy was used to describe intemperate climate e.g. cold enough to freeze the whiskers, tail, nose, ears etc. off of a brass monkey. And it was not used expressly for low temperature. And it wasn't uncommon to "sweat a brass monkey" or "hot enough to scald the throat of a brass monkey". My mother ascribed it to the fact that people used door-stops in the shapes of animals (most commonly the monkey) in the late colonial period. A heavey brass device which would prop open your screen doors in the summer. When temperatures would drop suddenly, they would say "You better close the doors. It's getting cold enough to freeze the balls off of the brass monkey." As you can guess, my mother is on heavy medication, and also believes that Eisenhouer is still President.
I bet you also belive that one about how "giving the finger" came about too? -Terry Interesting conversation! I had always heard that the opposite was true - ie that the brass 'monkey' contracted more during the extreme cold, while the iron balls did not. Therefore the brass tray (monkey) shrank to the point of being too small to contain the balls, allowing them to fall off ?! Cheers, Fred /// [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list /// Send admin requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] /// or try http://www.team.net/cgi-bin/majorcool /// Archives at http://www.team.net/archive /// Send list postings to [EMAIL PROTECTED] /// Edit your replies! If they include this trailer, they will NOT be sent.
