Dead as a Doornail

Granddaughter #1 has been in A Christmas Carol at the Palace Theater (she is in that first picture, from last year) two years running, and I thought last year when the line "Old Marley was dead as a doornail" went by that I should mention to everyone here where that comes from. The rest of the line in the book seldom makes it into a playscript.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

It is a reminder that our impression that people from one past century are better placed than we are to know about meanings and customs of earlier centuries is extremely unreliable. Sometimes it is true.  A word or a practice from the 1500s stays in use until the early 1900s, so my grandfather might have understood it where I do not.  Yet if it went out of use, the unavailability of reference works and the lack of historical research makes it far more likely that we have access to the information today.  It is the same with knowing ancestors. A ggggrandmother that we can find is certainly more likely to just know her mother's name, and her grandmother's, and we wish we could talk to her and have her fill us in. Yet a generation beyond that, and certainly two generations, we are likely better placed than she was to know who those people are, because people have done the work and we can look it up. The internet has enormously increased people's knowledge of their ancestors.  Believe me, I fought my way through town records and bad microfiche and old cemeteries in the 1980s, and going just one generation farther back was often a major accomplishment.  Now, all those people with OCD have done the work for you, God bless them.

So Charles Dickens did not know where the phrase came from, but we do, and that is not at all surprising. I got some sense of it years ago when taking Theatre 202, the introduction to the technical arts of lighting, costuming, and sets, both building and design. We learned very precise ways of building a theatrical flat - why canvas is better than muslin, why the glue made from horse bones* holds paint better, why the grain of the wood needs to go in certain directions and the different species of wood best for the various parts.  That was fifty years ago and much of set design is electronic and projected now, so I have no idea how much of this knowledge is still being passed on. But to our point here, the nailing together of the stiles, rails, and toggles were on corner blocks, straps, and half-straps,** nailed from the front of the flat with soft nails against a metal plate that bent the nail over, back into the wood in the back, making it extra secure, so it wouldn't just rip out while being yanked around. It was called clinching the nail, and the nail, once bent, was called dead, because it was bent and could not be reused. Perhaps that is common terminology in other carpentyry as well.  I have no clue.

That was what they did with nails in Olden Times to hold the wood of a door to its bracing on the inside of it as well.  One used nails that were too long and hammered them against a metal surface so that they curled back and held more tightly.  Doors take a lot of abuse, after all, and nails could pull free if they were merely left straight. 

*Lots of horrified, pale faces on freshman girls at that news.

*And yes, that was exactly what the first quiz of that section was on.  Introductory courses in just about everything start with vocabulary.