ArcaMax

You've probably encountered a rather macabre treatise titled "Life in the 1500s," a ghastly goulash of completely false etymologies that's been sludging through the arteries of the Internet for decades.

I suppose there's no harm in chuckling at this collection of "verban" legends, but for anyone who actually cares about determining the true origins of words, reading "Life in the 1500s" is like hearing a guy tell lies about your best friends. You want to punch him in the nose.

Failing that, I'll have to settle for shredding the most preposterous of these fabrications:

Verban Legend No. 1: People acquired diseases of the mouth from eating out of worm-infested wooden trenchers, hence the term "trench-mouth."

Nice try. In fact, "trench mouth" didn't appear in English until 1918. It described a painful bacterial infection of the mouth common among soldiers fighting in the trenches during World War I.

Verban Legend No. 2: Family members would keep watch over the body of a deceased relative to make sure he or she was really dead and didn't wake up, hence the term "wake" for such a vigil.

Not quite. The term "wake" does derive from the concept of being awake, but it refers not to the deceased, but to the watchful wakefulness of the family members keeping vigil over the body.

Verban Legend No. 3: To make sure no one was buried alive, people would tie a string around the wrist of a buried body, thread it out of the coffin, and tie it to a bell near the gravesite. Someone would watch over the graveyard, and if the bell rang, frantically exhume the coffin beneath it. Thus, the "dead" person who supposedly rang the bell was called a "dead ringer."

Ding-dong! In fact, "ringer" was once a slang term for a con artist who tried to pass off cheap brass rings as gold rings. Eventually, "ringer" came to mean anything that looked exactly like something else.

As for "dead," one meaning of "dead" is "exact," as in "dead right" and "dead on." So an exact look-alike was called a "dead ringer."

It was horse racing that popularized the term. Crafty gamblers would replace a nag that always finished last with a "dead ringer," an exact look-alike who was much faster. Other gamblers, mistaking the fast horse for the slow nag, bet on the other horses.

This created extremely long odds against the "dead ringer," dramatically increasing his payoff when he won.

And if I ever wanted to concoct my own verban legend, I'd tell you the "dead ringer" scheme gave us the term "daily double."

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Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to Wordguy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

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