Interesting Words

[SARGE]

All my life I've heard he's a dead ringer and was always curious about where graveyard shift came from, even when I worked some of them. Never knew what those words meant and how they came to be.

[Bob338]

"A ringer is a horse substituted for another of similar appearance in order to defraud the bookies. This word originated in the US horse-racing fraternity at the end of the 19th century. The word is defined for us in a copy of the Manitoba Free Press from October 1882:

"A horse that is taken through the country and trotted under a false name and pedigree is called a 'ringer.'"

It has since been adopted into the language to mean any very close duplicate. As a verb, 'ring' has long been used to mean 'exchange/substitute' in a variety of situations, most of them illegal. From the same period is the term 'ring castors', meaning to surreptitiously exchange hats. Castors, or casters, were hats made from beaver fur. From the 20th century we have the Australian phrase, 'ring in the gray (or knob)', meaning to substitute a double-sided penny for a genuine one. Coming more up to date we have 'car ringing', which is the replacing of the identification numbers on a stolen car with those from a genuine (usually scrapped) vehicle.

So, that's ringer; what about dead? Dead, in the sense of lifeless, is so commonly used that we tend to ignore its other meanings. The meaning that's relevant here is exact or precise. This is demonstrated in many phrases; 'dead shot', 'dead centre', 'dead heat', etc.

So, 'dead ringer' is literally the same as 'exact duplicate'. It first came into use soon after the word ringer itself, in the US at the end of the 19th century."

and,

"The Graveyard Shift, or Graveyard Watch, was the name coined for the work shift of the early morning, typically midnight until 8am. The name originated in the USA at the latter end of the 1800s. There's no evidence at all that it had anything directly to do with watching over graveyards, merely that the shifts took place in the middle of the night, when the ambience was quiet and lonely.

The earliest example of the phrase in print that I have found is in the US newspaper The Salt Lake Tribune, June 1897:

The police changed shifts for the month yesterday. This month Sergeant Ware takes the morning relief. Sergeant Matt Rhodes the middle and Sergeant John Burbidge the graveyard shift.

The 'graveyard watch' version of the phrase was normally used by sailors on watch - hardly a group in a position to supervise buried coffins. The graveyard link was made explicit in this definition, offered by the American mariner Gershom Bradford, in A Glossary of Sea Terms, 1927:

"Graveyard watch, the middle watch or 12 to 4 a.m., because of the number of disasters that occur at this time." "

[SARGE]

I don't know, I was talking to some former drinking buds who still have a few brain cells left. Nothing like meeting and drinking iced tea, lol. They told me that dead ringer comes from an era where folks in a coma got buried, no emblaming, and they somehow discovered they weren't really dead; how they found out who knows. So thereafter when a person died (or supposedly did) they tied a string around their toe, and ran the string up the ground and attached it to a bell on top of the grave. If the bell rang, after an unspecified time, they would get dug up, the air trapped in the coffin being enough to sustain them for a short bit. Makes sense to me.

The graveyard shift comes in because someone had to sit out there waiting for a possible bell to ring in the wee hours. We all agreed, none of us would do that alone in a cemetery at night or w/o a case of beer at least. Imagine sitting there and a bell did ring...

[bob]

Did they get that from the Encyclopedia Moronica?

[Bob338]

I heard those stories persistently in emails and looked them up. They've been debunked. Also heard a similar story about our favorite f word, which has a colorful origin on the internet, but that too has been debunked. I think 14 year olds sit at home dreaming about these things. Lots of info on Google about all this.

[bob]

I only use Google/search if I do not already kinda know.

[SARGE]

If google has it, then it has to be right, right? When the legend becomes the truth, print the legend I always say. And why not? Mankind even been trying to disprove for forever the existence of God.

[Bob338]

No, Google doesn't have to be right. It only points you to multiple sources which have researched.

[SARGE]

But they leave out the rest, pick and choose and even collaborates in political realm. I dumped all their products but being so big and a major contributor to certain causes, they win by virtue of suppressing opinions and even truths. The truth is out there.

[bob]

Use Yahoo search.

[SARGE]

The old "I read it on the Internet, so it must be true" pablum, right?

[glc]

Well, if you don't like Google, Yahoo, or Bing - there's always DuckDuckGo.

[David M]

In the merchant marine, the watch from 0000 to 0400 is called Midwatch. Never heard it called the graveyard watch. Maybe that's a Navy term?