I have a question about an old saying.?

Question

The old saying,"Dead as a doornail."Where does it come from, what IS a doornail, what does the saying mean,etc.?My husband is @ work, & the guys he works with, have elected me to find this out for them.I'm not sure why .Just one of those things guys talk about at work, I guess. I'm supposed to let them know the answer at their lunch time, if possible. Thank you guys ahead of time. You're great !

Answer 1

Before modern times nails were hand made and very valuable. If a building were abandoned it was often burned down and the nails recovered. A door being opened and shut all the time had a tendency for the nails to work out so the would drive in nails that penatrated the wood to the other side and then they would bend them over to more secure them. This made them particularly unsalvageble or dead.

Answer 2

This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.

But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Could it be because of the repetition of sounds, and the much better rhythm of the phrase compared with the version without door? Almost certainly the euphony has caused the phrase to survive longer than the alternatives I’ve quoted. But could there something special about a doornail?
The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.

But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know.

Answer 3

Although, I don't know for certain where this old saying comes from, I can reasonably assume that the saying originates from people who saw inanimate objects such as doornails as being 'dead'. However, any inanimate object can arguably be regarded as dead.

It's also an old saying that slides off the tongue easily and has some verbal impact behind it. "Is it dead?" "Yep. It's as dead as a doornail." The term, doornail, acts as a metaphor describing the state of complete non movement of something. I hope this helps you and your pals.

Answer 4

Let's see- shooting from the hip- a doornail must be one of those big handmade decorative nails you see in oak doors.

You have to keep pounding them on the head to put them in, and I guess if one blow to the head is lethal, 9 or 10 hits would make them dead ten times over.