A bit of English slang history

[maceemiller]

Here's something you may or may not find interesting about where some English slang originated.....

 

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting to smell . ...... . Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting Married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof... Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "Dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would Sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive... So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, 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 (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

And that's the truth....Now, whoever said History was boring?

 

Hope you found it even slightly Interesting 

Edited December 12, 2016 by maceemiller

[Slam_Jones]

I feel like I've read this before...  Oh, right...  It's satire.

http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/1500.asp

 

" Origins:   In a nutshell, this article about "Life in the 1500s" is nothing more than an extended joke, someone's idea of an amusing leg-pull which began its Internet life in April 1999. All of the historical and linguistic facts it purports to offer are simply made up and contrary to documented facts: "

Edited December 12, 2016 by Slam_Jones

[maceemiller]

I love theway it makes you think....after all, how are we to know.....

[Dman979]

1 hour ago, maceemiller said:

after all, how are we to know.....

By studying the past, not imagining what it was like. You make the hypothesis, then you gather evidence, then you refine your hypothesis.

The "How are we to know" attitude is a reason that fake news gets spread so quickly nowadays. I mean, my reality's just as valid as yours, right?

 

Wrong. Facts are facts. The ones based on fact are valid. Everything else is a fun thought experiment, nothing more.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, maceemiller said:

they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot.

 

7 hours ago, maceemiller said:

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof.

Placing the fireplace under the meat respawn and keeping the pot permanently opened, they could have an eternal meat soup.
Maybe this is an origin of a tale about the Magic Porridge Pot and the Horn of Plenty 

7 hours ago, maceemiller said:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting to smell . ...... . Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.

Gemini-7 and other experiments demonstrate that it smells only first two weeks.

And it should be very powerful flowers to override a whole human odor. 

7 hours ago, maceemiller said:

This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed.

I.e. it was a problem only in May.

7 hours ago, maceemiller said:

The floor was dirt.

What wasn't?

7 hours ago, maceemiller said:

Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food,

In temperance is salvation. 

7 hours ago, maceemiller said:

They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up.

With stakes. To finish off.

7 hours ago, maceemiller said:

When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive... So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, 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 (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

They should have hard nails...
Why then bury them, rather than placing in a barrack with a door bell. Also it would be easier to trace if somebody of them gets out every full moon.

[monstah]

19 hours ago, Dman979 said:

The "How are we to know" attitude is a reason that fake news gets spread so quickly nowadays.

That and "it doesn't cost anything trying". Well, it doesn't cost anything to Google, either, and if in less than ten seconds I can switch from WhatsApp, Google and find at least three results calling whatever it was BS, then I say that yes, trying (whatever it is) costs a lot: your ability to think through anything critically before accepting blindly what you're told.

Seriously, the things people share on WhatsApp and Facebook and etc. are appalling

Some of these (in the OP) are actually funny, but they should be shared as what they are: humour, not knowledge.

[Dman979]

2 minutes ago, monstah said:

 I say that yes, trying (whatever it is) costs a lot: your ability to think through anything critically before accepting blindly what you're told.

Yup. Who actually thinks it would be a good idea to throw boiling water on your frozen windshield? Do the opposite and put an icecube in hot water.

It cracks. Don't you think your windshield would do the same thing?

2 minutes ago, monstah said:

Some of these (in the OP) are actually funny, but they should be shared as what they are: humour, not knowledge.

I want to see the "Shuttle SRBs are that size because of Roman Chariots" copypasta on here. That would get demolished so quickly.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, Dman979 said:

I want to see the "Shuttle SRBs are that size because of Roman Chariots" copypasta on here.

As you wish

7 hours ago, Dman979 said:

Yup. Who actually thinks it would be a good idea to throw boiling water on your frozen windshield? Do the opposite and put an icecube in hot water.

It cracks. Don't you think your windshield would do the same thing?

Unless you have a quartz windshield.

[Dman979]

Just now, kerbiloid said:

As you wish

Not really what I was going for here. Try posting it in Science and Spaceflight.

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp

Quote

As for the Space Shuttle addendum to this piece, when Thiokol was building the solid rocket boosters (SRB) for the space shuttle, they had to keep shipping considerations in mind, but they didn't have to alter their design because any particular tunnel that lay between their plant and the Florida launch site wasn't large enough. Railroads don't run through tunnels only "slightly wider than the railroad track" unless every one of their engines and all their rolling stock are also only "slightly wider than the railroad track," and unless all tunnels encompass only a single set of tracks. Data from the U.S. Army's Rail Transport in a Theater of Operations document, for example, makes it fairly clear that one would be hard-pressed to find railroad equipment anywhere only "slightly wider" than 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

Over and above our love of odd facts, this tale about railroad gauges succeeds because of the imagery of its play on words: space shuttle technology was designed not by a horse's ass (figuratively, some overpaid government know-it-all) but because of a horse's ass (literally, the width of that particular portion of equine anatomy). People find this notion amusing, feeding the story's popularity as charmed readers continue to pass it along to others in a cascade of forwards.

 

[kerbiloid]

Of course, counting inches is a wrong way, because precise values depend on random factors. 

But the fact is stiil that 4.1..4.5 m is a world-wide logistics standard. Somewhere 4.15 m, somewhere 4.6 m.
And almost all human history, except the last century, logistics is a synonym of anthropometry and hyppometry. You need barrels and packs which you can take by hands, put on a horse- powered carriage and transport to an oars-powered ship.
Unless you prefer to make a parallel logistics from scratch, you must obey the existing rules.

Edited December 14, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Dman979]

Check this out:

Quote

claims about a direct line descent between ancient Roman chariot tracks and the standard U.S. railway gauge jump the tracks when confronted with the fact that despite some commonality of equipment, well into the 19th century the U.S. still did not have one "standard" railroad gauge. At the time of the Civil War, even though nearly all of the Confederacy's railroad equipment had come from the North or from Britain (of the 470 locomotives built in the U.S. in 1860, for example, only 19 were manufactured in the South), 113 different railroad companies in the Confederacy operated on three different gauges of track. This lack of standardization was, as historian James McPherson points out, one of the many reasons the Union was able to finally vanquish the Confederacy militarily.

Quote

The eventual standardization of railroad gauge in the U.S. was due far less to a slavish devotion to a gauge inherited from England than to the simple fact that the North won the Civil War and, in the process, rebuilt much of the Southern railway system to match its own.

 

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

But the fact is stiil that 4.1..4.5 m is a world-wide logistics standard. Somewhere 4.15 m, somewhere 4.6 m.

And the fact is also that it happens to be about the size of two horses next to each other. I'm not disagreeing with you here, if you read the Snopes article they say as much.

Quote

Unless you prefer to make a parallel logistics from scratch, you must obey the existing rules.

Are you trying to say that the Shuttle SRBs are that size because of the Roman Chariots? I'm confused.

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Unless you have a quartz windshield.

I'm not sure where you're from, but in the US all windshields are made out of layered glass. (It used to be tempered, but layered is better).

Also, it's kinda a moot point, and is tangential to the OP. I'm curious why you brought it up. Were you trying to find the an example that makes me wrong? It's such an extreme that it's irrelevant. Honestly, it seems like you're trying to contradict me for contradiction's sake.

 

Edited December 14, 2016 by Dman979

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Dman979 said:

Are you trying to say that the Shuttle SRBs are that size because of the Roman Chariots?

I just believe in technological standartization. When they have industrial equipment to make, say, 3.5-3.8 meter tubes and carriages to move, say, 3.5-4 meters cargo, in most cases they will use existing equipment following widely used sizes. A bright sample of this - Proton/Almaz, when a family of rockets, spaceship, heavy satellite and orbital stations are made of the same primitives.

Not sure about exactly Roman chariots (because not all roads in Europe have such long history), but absolutely sure that all logistics is based on "traditional" logistics, i.e. on human and horse size and abilities.

For example, both MOL and Almaz/Salyut have 2x2 corridor through the station internals. Just in MOL there are several 2x2x2 m cubes (workspace, habitat, laboratory), in Almaz - a long 2x2 m corridor.
Because a human has usually 2x2 m size, nevermind is he Roman or not.
 

Spoiler

 

2 hours ago, Dman979 said:

Honestly, it seems like you're trying to contradict me for contradiction's sake.

With quartz windows - yes, a little. 

[Dman979]

51 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

I just believe in technological standartization. When they have industrial equipment to make, say, 3.5-3.8 meter tubes and carriages to move, say, 3.5-4 meters cargo, in most cases they will use existing equipment following widely used sizes. A bright sample of this - Proton/Almaz, when a family of rockets, spaceship, heavy satellite and orbital stations are made of the same primitives.

Well, yeah. COTS is much cheaper than designing a new part. And anything designed to fit humans will have human specifications in mind. Bearing in mind that we're relatively the same the world over, you could make the wildly outrageous claim that the design of a submarine's center aisle is based on the size of Roman sidewalks. In reality, they're both designed for humans to walk on, so it's quite a gross oversimplification to say that one is based off the other.

But the story you linked to a link to is trying to say that the shuttle SRBs are that width because of the Roman chariots. Which is wrong, and also demeans our critical thinking abilities. I mean, honestly, have you seen a train tunnel? They're a lot larger than 4 feet, 8 inches wide.

[kerbiloid]

A cargo carriage width is not exactly equal to the horse width. It's 1.5-2 times wider.
And as heavy carriages were mostly harnessed pair-by-pair, a typical carriage width would be about (1.5..2)x2xhorse_width.
As cargo logistics is based on either city streets or country roads, where at least one cargo carriage should run through, but in duplex mode - two of them (toward each other), and most of cities have been built.earlier than any other kind of transport appeared, and the same with ferry boats size, we can presume that the transport logistics is based on a horse-powered carriage size.

Spoiler

 

[lajoswinkler]

Wow, this thing still lives on. April 1999.

http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/1500.asp

 FALSE

[Red Iron Crown]

On 12/12/2016 at 10:19 PM, Dman979 said:

By studying the past, not imagining what it was like. You make the hypothesis, then you gather evidence, then you refine your hypothesis.

The "How are we to know" attitude is a reason that fake news gets spread so quickly nowadays. I mean, my reality's just as valid as yours, right?

 

Wrong. Facts are facts. The ones based on fact are valid. Everything else is a fun thought experiment, nothing more.

It really gets interesting when you realize that there are no "facts". Only observations and hypotheses, all of which deserve skepticism and gauging of their accuracy.

[Dman979]

1 hour ago, Red Iron Crown said:

It really gets interesting when you realize that there are no "facts". Only observations and hypotheses, all of which deserve skepticism and gauging of their accuracy.

Don't you try to bring that cube root stuff here!