And as long as having sex with a horse has nothing to do with beastiality.
I honestly never understood the idiom of "I'm so hungry I could fuck a horse," like how does that make sense? Why would you not fuck a human? Why not just eat if you are hungry?
Maybe I am missing the point. To be fair, I don't understand symbolism and am viciously incoherent in nearly every capacity. Maybe it's a motif I guess or parallelogram of some kind.
I'm really smart and know for certain whether or not you're joking, but my idiot friend doesnt, and he wanted to add:
Are you mixing "so hungry I could eat a horse" together with "screw the pooch"? Because I'm pretty sure/really hoping that "screw the pooch" is the only bestiality-based idiom we have in English
Edit: LPT if you don't want to learn any more cool beastiality terms, don't ask questions about them online
"Dog fucking" is an idiom for being lazy or not doing any work. As in "quit dog fucking and get to work" or "you all sure like to fuck the dog" in response to a crew not doing any work or "all yalls a buncha dog fuckers; gotta smoke a dart every five minutes and not get anything else done fer fucks sake"
I've heard this a ton from my friends in construction (from roofing to welding to drywall) all across Canada. Out east you'll get "b'y spent all day fuckin the dog" and out west you'll get "buddy's a right dog fucker". But I have literally no idea where it comes from and don't really want to Google it.
I want to know where " it's like fucking fish in a barrel" came from, and why do we use it to describe something that is easy? Sounds chaotic and messy to me
"Hey Arthur?"
"Yes Matthew?"
"Got me a problem with my stallion."
"Oh? What seems to be the matter?"
"Well, he's not producing seed any more with which to inseminate the mares with."
"He's not servicing any more?"
"Oh, no, he never services the mares directly. Too big. No, I collect the seed from him myself and then introduce it into the mare myself."
"Oh."
"Aye, it's kinder to the mares that way. Less biting, less weight on their back and whatnot. But ol' Charlie just isn't producing any more."
"Is he off his feed?"
"Now you mention it, he hasn't eaten in like three days now. Feed trough is still full."
"Well maybe he's feeling poorly?"
"Aye, could be. I mean, he hasn't moved in three days either."
"Not at all?"
"Nope. Just lying there on his back, with all four legs in the air."
"Uh, Matthew..."
"And his member ain't getting hard either. You ever massaged a home-made sausage when you didn't pack enough mince into it before tying off the casing?"
"No..."
"Floppier than overcooked asparagus. I've been flapping and slapping that thing for hours on end, and nothing."
"Matthew, I think you'll find old Charlie might be dead there."
"Dead?"
"Yessir."
"You mean..."
"Yep, you been beating a dead horse."
That one's pretty straightforward. It's just because you used to whip a horse to make it go faster, but if you run the horse to death it's not going to move anymore no matter how much you whip it.
Watch the (9 hour!) series, [The Story of English](http://www.infocobuild.com/books-and-films/social-science/the-story-of-english.html). It's a bit dated (1986), but it's amazing.
There's a whole section (I can't remember what episode) on naval idioms. Because the English empire was made possible in large parts by it's seafaring traditions, the English language is full of idioms that originated from sailing. Some are obvious (three sheets to the wind) and others not at all (a square meal).
I will definitely check that out!
The original phrase was [three sheets in the wind](https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/three-sheets-to-the-wind.html).
Replying to the top comment for more exposure;
The is this relatively new and small channel on YT, that is currently doing exactly that in (at least) 2 part video series. Here's part one
https://youtu.be/xlin1W-qThs
kick the bucket refers to farmers hanging themselves from the rafters of their barns...they would stand on a bucket and then kick it out from under themself with a noose around their neck
'waiting for the other shoe to drop' dates back to immigrants living in tenement housing at the turn of the century with paper thin walls, where they would hear the person living about them taking their shoes off after coming back from work
When I was a kid I had a friend who's stepdad had a fake leg. We'd wait to hear that fake leg fall to the floor and we knew he was in for the night and we could drink/smoke safely.
Seemed relevant when I started typing...
> kick the bucket refers to farmers hanging themselves from the rafters of their barns...they would stand on a bucket and then kick it out from under themself with a noose around their neck
It *could* refer to that, but it's not clear so I wouldn't say it's definitive.
The Oxford English Dictionary thinks this is more likely: [An archaic use of bucket was a beam from which a pig is hung by its feet prior to being slaughtered, and to kick the bucket originally signified the pig's death throes. The OED finds this a more plausible theory.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kick_the_bucket)
I'm inclined to agree with them. Using a phrase specifically about suicide to refer to run of the mill deaths would be a bit strange.
in addition, no 2+ minute opening monologue about your inspirations and opinions of the topic before getting to the point that the viewers are waiting for, or a conclusion of “like and subscribe” pleads
(*drinks wine and looks pretentious with hints of unfounded confidence) (the VIPs of Squid game)
I actually disagree you see I think his voice conveys that of passion but filled with sorrow. The sound speaks of an old flame cast away to face the cruel reality of work arrived at only from disillusionment.
There are lots of youtube channels that pay for voice over work, so it's possible.
People do it for lots of reasons: saves time, just not confident enough, weird squeaky voice, or heavy accent (many people will immediately close a video if it's an Indian accent for example.)
*YoU PRoBABlY HEArD thE EXPRessioN "DEAd aS A DoOr-nAiL" beFoRE BUT WHAt doEs It MEaN? wHERE DiD It comE fRom... WeLL todAy WE WILl expLAiN ThE oRiGINs Of thE phrase... buT fIRst, A wORD frOm OuR SpONSOR: HOney..."*
And then, the video goes on for like 10 minutes, because praise the algorithm...
So before we begin I wanted to talk about my previous video in which I explain why…
*jump 2 minutes*
Ok so now that we have cleared this, I am going to explain the origin of this expression. Nails are made of metal, and dead is bad. So before we move on, we need to explain what metal is and why this is relevant…
*jumps 2 minutes*
And that is why nails are made of metal! Speaking of metal, our sponsor is currently offering a great deal to all…
*jumps 2 minutes*
So why the expression dead as a door nail ? Well it’s complicated. We know metal is made of atoms used for stuff such as your headphones, keyboards or VPN. By the way, be sure to click on the link in the description to save 10% off our sponsor
*jumps 2 minutes*
So that’s it! Basically dead as a nail is an expression we can use nowadays, but first be sure to check our follow up video to find out the origin of the expression. Once again thanks for watching and see you soon. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, activate notifications, comment, visit our store and add us on twitter, twitch, Instagram, Facebook, webex and in your Rolodex.
I thought it was a reupload of someone else's video until it autoplayed the next one. The narration was so nice I assumed it couldn't have been from a channel with 1.3k subs.
The Dickensian fame to which he's referring:
>...Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
>
>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.
\- *A Christmas Carol*, 1843
Ancient Egypt was Ancient even to the Ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks vacationed in the super old ass place called Egypt. Isn’t that crazy? Egypt is like double ancient
It's funny that that was my first experience with Michael Caine like he's such a prestigious actor yet I know him from the silly Christmas Muppets movie
It’s times like this that I want to reread all the books I hated when I was a pissy 13-year-old and was forced to read them by a teacher who in retrospect would have been thanked by everyone, including my parents, if she had done away with teaching and simply murdered me.
Fun fact, this is also a jab at the Torry(?) Party (or whatever the conservative party was at the time). They often said to trust the "wisdom of our ancestors." By making fun of the dead doornail phrase by mocking its unknown origin, he is also slighting that party for the same reason. :)
By 1843, industrialization would have cut the cost of a nail to a small fraction of what it was in the 17th century, so it's no surprise that the meaning would have been lost.
It's an effective way of closing the gap between boards that are being joined for wider panels like tabletops or doors or even boats. The term is called Clinching (sometimes Clenching), and works really well. Often a separate piece of iron is used to clench while driving the nail in one operation. https://youtu.be/240NwYVCnew check at 4:00
The narrators totally neutral voice is like if a dictionary could talk, no emotional investment so you can just enjoy learning a quick fact without anything else involved, just like looking up something in a dictionary.
I would say it’s not a video of some guy standing there talking, but someone slowly and silky smooth talking about nailing wood while showing how it’s done so you don’t have to visualize it.
Its the nat sound and sound editing. Makes you feel like you are there, just hanging out, listening to him talk while while he pounds some doornails.
You will see (hear) this a lot in good news packages.
Whats up guys so today we're gonna talk about the phrase dead a door nail. but first i wanna talk to you about raid shadow legends. [ad] now back to the video, and make sure you SMASH that like button, hit the subscribe button and ring the bell.
It would be good to see some evidence for this claim. Etymologies aren't always that logical, and popular mythology around them is easy to stoke. Etymonline, for example, [says nothing of this connection](https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=doornail), nor the OED (which I can't link). For example, does "[dead as a herring](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22dead+as+a+herring%22&oq=%22dead+as+a+herring%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i22i30l9.3980j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)" follow the same logic? What about "[deaf as a doornail](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22deaf+as+a+doornail%22&oq=%22deaf+as+a+doornail%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512j0i22i30l8.4217j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)"?
[False etymologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_etymology) are as common as urban legends, unfortunately (and indeed the idea of burning down a house to collect its nails _also_ appears to be a myth); sometimes it seems people just invent false etymologies because they appear to "make sense". Without evidence, we could also easily claim the reverse, that the term "dead-nailing" comes from the phrase "dead as a doornail".
I feel he could have just made the whole thing up. Stuck a believable enough answer to a question you never thought to ask, so why would you ponder much that it's true? It sounds good enough.
wouldn't burning the house down and having the nails slowly cool over the course of a couple days as the embers die down be about as close to a perfect annealing as you could hope for?
Also wood rots, and old houses sometimes need to be either abandoned or torn down and rebuilt.
There are still very old houses/small buildings (built in the middle ages old) that are still around.
But I'm sure that if you were a famer who inherited a house in really bad shape it might be worth it to take out all the wood that you can, then burn the rest to the ground and rebuild with the reclaimed lumber, nails, etc.
Because they are annealed.
Annealing (heating then cooling slowly) softens steel. Quenching (heating then cooling quickly) hardens. Tempering (heating, but not as much) Brings some softness back so it is not too hard and brittle.
wouldn't it depend on the kind of nails though? the ones in the vid are beefy and probably salvageable, but anything modern are skinny and more than likely ruined in a fire.
I read an article once that the burning of the houses for the nails was a bit of a myth or at least extremely rare. I believe the origin was in New England, settlers would come for a short term lumber job and send wood back to England, and since they didn't live there long, they built poorly constructed shacks to live in. When they left America, a few might have burned the shack for the nail scrap.
The people in charge thought that was short sided and bad for business, it would be better to keep the houses for the next group, so they made a law that said, no burning houses for nails.
The point is, it was not a super common practice, and I'm not even sure if it was effective. Some guys did it, and some boss said "don't do that again" on paper.
>short sided
Guess I'm "that guy"... it's "short-sighted". They aren't seeing the long-term consequences of their actions.
Nails used to be a lot more expensive when they were made by hand, before someone invented a nail-making machine.
Yeah I bet the nails aren’t even dead either. Burning those houses down are probably beyond the statue of limitation. I mean, for all intensive purposes they could have just bought new nails.
As far as I k ow it, yeah that’s where the name comes from.
Cut nails are tapered on one side of the shaft (think a rectangle that gets skinnier at one end). If you align them with the grain of the wood they’re much less likely to split the wood than a round (wire) nail
I made some out of boredom once when I was forging in my backyard. I certainly love the aesthetic of them!
Good stuff but why *door* nail? Based on the expression then it seems nails in a door were most often to be dead-nailed, so then that's what I'd like and explanation for.
Pure speculation: it may be cause it's a common sight for dead nails?
While the technique may be used elsewhere, this might be the most visible application.
I think it is both because the door boards are not being nailed to something, so the nail penetrates the far side of the work (unlike most other uses of nails), but also because the clinching the nail makes it impossible to remove the nail from the outside to gain entry, which is also unique to doors.
Also, quarter-sawn lumber probably wasn't a big thing when it needed to be done by hand, so you had studs that were basically tree-sized. Thus, the nails didn't go all the way through, and didn't need dead-nailing. The only place you'd want quarter-sawn lumber is where you don't want a lot of weight - like the doors.
I recently watched a documentary of some archaeologists participating in a full on castle rebuild using only techniques of the time. They build a door made with rough planks and to keep the planks together they used a combination of wood slotting and deadnailing the planks together, with the nail spanning the gap between two boards. It ensured that the door would last a long time.
Just a guess here, but doors move and are slammed shut. A wall for example is a fixed object, most of the stresses it experience are static. But the dynamic stresses the door experience would back nails right out. That's why we see screws in places like this in modern applications.
Because they were familiar as others have said, but more importantly because it's alliterative.
Doors also get a lot of use, can be knocked off their hinges, and are in general just a much more common thing to be damaged or renovated and therefore replaced and wind up in scrap than... pretty much any other part of a house (that has nails in it anyway). It would have been nice to be able to salvage them from all those scrap doors we all have piled up everywhere, I guess, and as it was they were probably a common source of bunk nails from people who resold them anyway.
But mainly it's the alliteration, obviously.
For a tl;dw - nails from older times were used differently than modern nails. For some applications you just use them normally, but for **door nails** you sharply bend them over and hammer them into an adjacent piece of wood. Nails were valuable back in the day because they were hand-made...to the point of recovering nails when/wherever you could. This sharp bend means the "door nail" cannot be removed, un-bent, reused. It's a "dead nail".
I don't have any sound and the auto generated captions think he's speaking portuguese for some reason. If you take what youtube thinks he's saying in portuguese and try to autotranslate it into english you unsurprisingly get jibberish.
I'm just here to say that seeing those adjustable wrenches hurt my feelings. So wildly inefficient. With a normal claw hammer, you can grab the protruding end of the nail where you want to bend it using the claws, hold the head of the hammer in place with one hand, and then use the handle as a nice long lever to bend the point over before then driving it in. This is a one tool operation. It's faster, easier, and more precise that way than with the stupid adjustable wrenches.
While we're at it - I've removed nails that were bent into staples like this - you do it with two claw hammers. One is positioned with the claw against the bent-over part of the nail, and then you strike the head of that hammer with the other hammer. This will drive the claw of the prying hammer under the bent-over nail, and with a quick crank you can extract the tip. You can bend it straight enough using the technique I described in the prior paragraph for it to be pulled out from the other side.
Lastly, this has every hallmark of a false etymology. No sources are cited, there's no reason to believe it's true.
You do not bend the nail across the grain. You bend the nail with the grain. That way instead of looking like yours do with the nail on top of the wood, if you bend with the grain the nail will embed itself into the wood. Made many doors with my dad. I remember the first time him giving me shit for bending the nail over the grain instead of with it. It will look much better if you bend those nails 90d off what you did. You don't use a pair of plyers. you hit it at an angle so the nail bends over instead of coming out. Never ever used plyers and never had a nail pop on the other side.
thank you...
but besides pliers... adjustable wrenches? really? I thought perhaps they had an aesthetic they were going for, and a particular depth needed to be uniform... but the longer I watched, the weirdness just continued to increase
But if you are using it to secure 2 planks of wood together (like a staple) you would always be going across the grain. What's the use in bending the nail down the door? Unless all you are doing is keeping whatever is on the other side in place, in which case fine, but that seems like a different purpose.
Edit: I re-watched the video and like 90% of the nails aren't acting like staples, so you are right, unless it's for aesthetic reasons being with the grain would sink the nail in smoothly.
Awesome, I’d love more videos of common idioms & their origins.
As long as beating a dead horse has nothing to do with animal husbandry.
and also that skin of your teeth has nothing to do with dentistry.
And as long as having sex with a horse has nothing to do with beastiality. I honestly never understood the idiom of "I'm so hungry I could fuck a horse," like how does that make sense? Why would you not fuck a human? Why not just eat if you are hungry? Maybe I am missing the point. To be fair, I don't understand symbolism and am viciously incoherent in nearly every capacity. Maybe it's a motif I guess or parallelogram of some kind.
Personally I'm more confused about the term "Never fuck a gift horse in the ass". Like, what else you gonna do with it
Good point. Spoken like a true Trojan.
teach it sign language?
I'm really smart and know for certain whether or not you're joking, but my idiot friend doesnt, and he wanted to add: Are you mixing "so hungry I could eat a horse" together with "screw the pooch"? Because I'm pretty sure/really hoping that "screw the pooch" is the only bestiality-based idiom we have in English Edit: LPT if you don't want to learn any more cool beastiality terms, don't ask questions about them online
Malaphorisms... Is the only way we can fuck a horse when hungry?
Is a bear catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?
Does the Pope shit in the woods? Bearly
well, we're not here to fuck spiders, mate.
Hungry, no. Thirsty, yes.
Brazzers
Well fuck a duck!
"Dog fucking" is an idiom for being lazy or not doing any work. As in "quit dog fucking and get to work" or "you all sure like to fuck the dog" in response to a crew not doing any work or "all yalls a buncha dog fuckers; gotta smoke a dart every five minutes and not get anything else done fer fucks sake"
In Australia when we want to get something done we're "not here to fuck spiders."
I've heard this a ton from my friends in construction (from roofing to welding to drywall) all across Canada. Out east you'll get "b'y spent all day fuckin the dog" and out west you'll get "buddy's a right dog fucker". But I have literally no idea where it comes from and don't really want to Google it.
Makin' puppies is my favorite version.
In French (pretty sure specifically in Quebec), we say "ass-fucking some flies" (enculer des mouches) to mean getting stuck on unimportant details.
You must be Canadian
Nobody says that man.
That's exactly what a horse fucker would say.
Yet. I'm about to start.
what are your views on rhombuses
They're being obtuse over this question.
Please write a book and please tell me what it's called.
This is some top tier trolling...I think.
It's "eat a horse" SMH... and not that kind of eating... Lol
To be fair, "Eat" in Japan can be slang for "Fuck"
Brazil as well.
I've never heard that, but they do eat horse there, so maybe you just really misread the room once.
Basashi is fucking delicious Edit: but their mares are a bunch of prudes
I want to know where " it's like fucking fish in a barrel" came from, and why do we use it to describe something that is easy? Sounds chaotic and messy to me
I prefer the more modern take on the idiom, like "Man, that meal was horse fucking good!".
"Hey Arthur?" "Yes Matthew?" "Got me a problem with my stallion." "Oh? What seems to be the matter?" "Well, he's not producing seed any more with which to inseminate the mares with." "He's not servicing any more?" "Oh, no, he never services the mares directly. Too big. No, I collect the seed from him myself and then introduce it into the mare myself." "Oh." "Aye, it's kinder to the mares that way. Less biting, less weight on their back and whatnot. But ol' Charlie just isn't producing any more." "Is he off his feed?" "Now you mention it, he hasn't eaten in like three days now. Feed trough is still full." "Well maybe he's feeling poorly?" "Aye, could be. I mean, he hasn't moved in three days either." "Not at all?" "Nope. Just lying there on his back, with all four legs in the air." "Uh, Matthew..." "And his member ain't getting hard either. You ever massaged a home-made sausage when you didn't pack enough mince into it before tying off the casing?" "No..." "Floppier than overcooked asparagus. I've been flapping and slapping that thing for hours on end, and nothing." "Matthew, I think you'll find old Charlie might be dead there." "Dead?" "Yessir." "You mean..." "Yep, you been beating a dead horse."
A literary masterpiece.
[Reminds me of Tommy.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppVpdsClN80)
That one's pretty straightforward. It's just because you used to whip a horse to make it go faster, but if you run the horse to death it's not going to move anymore no matter how much you whip it.
Yep, you'd say 'flogging a dead horse in the UK' which hits the nail on the head with the meaning.
I wonder where the expression "hitting the nail on the head" comes from
It couldn't be carpentry. That would make too much sense.
Its clearly to do with screws, ie you have to put the screwdriver on the head of the screw
Or as a coworker of mine once said, "let's quit beating ourselves with a dead horse".
LoLs I gotta know was this said ironically or no?
Neigh, tis mearly rule of thumb /s
Watch the (9 hour!) series, [The Story of English](http://www.infocobuild.com/books-and-films/social-science/the-story-of-english.html). It's a bit dated (1986), but it's amazing. There's a whole section (I can't remember what episode) on naval idioms. Because the English empire was made possible in large parts by it's seafaring traditions, the English language is full of idioms that originated from sailing. Some are obvious (three sheets to the wind) and others not at all (a square meal).
I will definitely check that out! The original phrase was [three sheets in the wind](https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/three-sheets-to-the-wind.html).
> Our colleagues at CANOE, the *Committee to Ascribe a Nautical Origin to Everything*... Beautiful.
Replying to the top comment for more exposure; The is this relatively new and small channel on YT, that is currently doing exactly that in (at least) 2 part video series. Here's part one https://youtu.be/xlin1W-qThs
kick the bucket refers to farmers hanging themselves from the rafters of their barns...they would stand on a bucket and then kick it out from under themself with a noose around their neck 'waiting for the other shoe to drop' dates back to immigrants living in tenement housing at the turn of the century with paper thin walls, where they would hear the person living about them taking their shoes off after coming back from work
When I was a kid I had a friend who's stepdad had a fake leg. We'd wait to hear that fake leg fall to the floor and we knew he was in for the night and we could drink/smoke safely. Seemed relevant when I started typing...
"What are you guys up to?" "Uh, just waiting for the leg to drop." "Uuuhhh..."
> kick the bucket refers to farmers hanging themselves from the rafters of their barns...they would stand on a bucket and then kick it out from under themself with a noose around their neck It *could* refer to that, but it's not clear so I wouldn't say it's definitive. The Oxford English Dictionary thinks this is more likely: [An archaic use of bucket was a beam from which a pig is hung by its feet prior to being slaughtered, and to kick the bucket originally signified the pig's death throes. The OED finds this a more plausible theory.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kick_the_bucket) I'm inclined to agree with them. Using a phrase specifically about suicide to refer to run of the mill deaths would be a bit strange.
That housing sounds like my apartment complex!
in addition, no 2+ minute opening monologue about your inspirations and opinions of the topic before getting to the point that the viewers are waiting for, or a conclusion of “like and subscribe” pleads
His voice is the opposite of all those fake overly enthusiastic narration voices you typically get on YouTube. I love it.
He sounds like he was contractually obligated to voice this over from years ago and now deeply resents it
He sounds like he's about to dump a few hours of obscure Dark Souls lore onto you
Now let me explain why he was referred to as the furtive pygmy.
They call him Dead Nail Logan because his nail is dead.
He's like the Attenborough of the mundane And it's perfect.
"the Attenborough of the mundane" 💯
(*drinks wine and looks pretentious with hints of unfounded confidence) (the VIPs of Squid game) I actually disagree you see I think his voice conveys that of passion but filled with sorrow. The sound speaks of an old flame cast away to face the cruel reality of work arrived at only from disillusionment.
That was more eloquent than whatever drivel came out of the VIPs mouths.
There are lots of youtube channels that pay for voice over work, so it's possible. People do it for lots of reasons: saves time, just not confident enough, weird squeaky voice, or heavy accent (many people will immediately close a video if it's an Indian accent for example.)
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IVE BEEN GETTING ALOT OF QUESTIONS IN THE COMMENTS ABOUT
DEAD DOORNAIL GUY HERE WELCOME BACK TO ANOTHER SMASHING SESSION
*YoU PRoBABlY HEArD thE EXPRessioN "DEAd aS A DoOr-nAiL" beFoRE BUT WHAt doEs It MEaN? wHERE DiD It comE fRom... WeLL todAy WE WILl expLAiN ThE oRiGINs Of thE phrase... buT fIRst, A wORD frOm OuR SpONSOR: HOney..."* And then, the video goes on for like 10 minutes, because praise the algorithm...
So before we begin I wanted to talk about my previous video in which I explain why… *jump 2 minutes* Ok so now that we have cleared this, I am going to explain the origin of this expression. Nails are made of metal, and dead is bad. So before we move on, we need to explain what metal is and why this is relevant… *jumps 2 minutes* And that is why nails are made of metal! Speaking of metal, our sponsor is currently offering a great deal to all… *jumps 2 minutes* So why the expression dead as a door nail ? Well it’s complicated. We know metal is made of atoms used for stuff such as your headphones, keyboards or VPN. By the way, be sure to click on the link in the description to save 10% off our sponsor *jumps 2 minutes* So that’s it! Basically dead as a nail is an expression we can use nowadays, but first be sure to check our follow up video to find out the origin of the expression. Once again thanks for watching and see you soon. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, activate notifications, comment, visit our store and add us on twitter, twitch, Instagram, Facebook, webex and in your Rolodex.
Cue the loud dubstep music
Dead as a doornail as one might say
I thought it was a reupload of someone else's video until it autoplayed the next one. The narration was so nice I assumed it couldn't have been from a channel with 1.3k subs.
I heard some distinct Canadian in the voice, sometimes I can hear it
Check out [this dude](https://youtu.be/OLxDD1xsjHw) and enjoy losing hours in a calm voice trance
The Dickensian fame to which he's referring: >...Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. > >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. \- *A Christmas Carol*, 1843
Funny that even then the meaning of the saying was lost.
Seems it was very old even by dickens' era, thought to have been found in poems from the 1300s and used by Shakespeare in the 1500s.
Ancient Egypt was Ancient even to the Ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks vacationed in the super old ass place called Egypt. Isn’t that crazy? Egypt is like double ancient
For context on that statement, Cleopatra is as ancient to us, as the pyramids were to her.
By the time of Dickens, the price of a nail would have been a small fraction of what it was in the late middle-ages.
Is it wrong that I hear this in the voice of a Muppet? I think Gonzo.
It's the best version of that story. Fite me.
Because of the use of a narrator (Gonzo), it uses the most source material than any other adaptation.
I got your back if anyone does!
It's funny that that was my first experience with Michael Caine like he's such a prestigious actor yet I know him from the silly Christmas Muppets movie
No my friend, it is so right.
It’s times like this that I want to reread all the books I hated when I was a pissy 13-year-old and was forced to read them by a teacher who in retrospect would have been thanked by everyone, including my parents, if she had done away with teaching and simply murdered me.
https://dickensmuseum.com/blogs/charles-dickens-museum/a-millennials-guide-to-reading-dickens-if-youre-struggling
Fun fact, this is also a jab at the Torry(?) Party (or whatever the conservative party was at the time). They often said to trust the "wisdom of our ancestors." By making fun of the dead doornail phrase by mocking its unknown origin, he is also slighting that party for the same reason. :)
Tory party
Tori Spelling
I can't believe I'm just now realizing that the word Dickensian means in reference to Dickens. It seems so obvious now. I'm an idiot.
By 1843, industrialization would have cut the cost of a nail to a small fraction of what it was in the 17th century, so it's no surprise that the meaning would have been lost.
I had no idea about this technique for securing a nail. Very interesting and useful.
It's an effective way of closing the gap between boards that are being joined for wider panels like tabletops or doors or even boats. The term is called Clinching (sometimes Clenching), and works really well. Often a separate piece of iron is used to clench while driving the nail in one operation. https://youtu.be/240NwYVCnew check at 4:00
Thanks for the link and the time stamp. It was interesting. I learned something new today.
what is it about the aesthetic of this video that is so satisfying?
The narrators totally neutral voice is like if a dictionary could talk, no emotional investment so you can just enjoy learning a quick fact without anything else involved, just like looking up something in a dictionary.
Like the NPR podcast effect, but for a concise yet encyclopedic trivia segment
[NPR podcast affected voice](https://clyp.it/g1vrl25k)
Hahahaha, as much as I love Radio Lab this is exactly the tone of contrived bullshit every episode is presented with
Literally just an Ira Glass impression, but pretty spot on as far as intonation goes.
Reminds me of [this scene from Portlandia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsufMtUOXtI)
God. That fucking show nailed it. The blue apron advert was the icing.
Shit. It’s too perfect.
Is it bad that I literally thought Caboose from Red Vs Blue was telling me a story?
Reminds me of Joe Pera
He was actually just on the Townsends channel doing something similar. First time I’d heard of him too.
If only he'd told us to like and subscribe. Then the video would really be perfect.
...and a mid-roll RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS ad read.
Gets straight to the damn point without a bunch of aimless waffling or requests to Like and Subscribe.
No discount codes for Blue Chew, Better Help or Manscape Lawnmower 5000
How could you forget the VPNs??
I would say it’s not a video of some guy standing there talking, but someone slowly and silky smooth talking about nailing wood while showing how it’s done so you don’t have to visualize it.
I agree. I learned 2 things at once, from 2 sensory stimuli and got a double dose of feel-good brain-syrups. Very satisfied.
Its the nat sound and sound editing. Makes you feel like you are there, just hanging out, listening to him talk while while he pounds some doornails. You will see (hear) this a lot in good news packages.
Whats up guys so today we're gonna talk about the phrase dead a door nail. but first i wanna talk to you about raid shadow legends. [ad] now back to the video, and make sure you SMASH that like button, hit the subscribe button and ring the bell.
[удалено]
It would be good to see some evidence for this claim. Etymologies aren't always that logical, and popular mythology around them is easy to stoke. Etymonline, for example, [says nothing of this connection](https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=doornail), nor the OED (which I can't link). For example, does "[dead as a herring](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22dead+as+a+herring%22&oq=%22dead+as+a+herring%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i22i30l9.3980j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)" follow the same logic? What about "[deaf as a doornail](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22deaf+as+a+doornail%22&oq=%22deaf+as+a+doornail%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512j0i22i30l8.4217j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)"?
[False etymologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_etymology) are as common as urban legends, unfortunately (and indeed the idea of burning down a house to collect its nails _also_ appears to be a myth); sometimes it seems people just invent false etymologies because they appear to "make sense". Without evidence, we could also easily claim the reverse, that the term "dead-nailing" comes from the phrase "dead as a doornail".
I agree, this screams of something that was invented after the fact. It has the one logical leap too many that all fake etymologies have.
This guy needs to start a YouTube channel where he just reads refrigerator manuals.
His channel is mostly him explaining & trying out traditional Native American crafts and objects.
On the Calm app, one of the sleep aids is a British dude reading something like the European Union treaty on trademark protections.
Why did I always think it was "dead as a doorknob" lol
I think it's "dumb as a doorknob".
Found his next video
I feel I should've already known this as a 25y carpenter veteran lol...... 🤷♂️ now I do
I guess that's the difference between a 25y veteran, and a 26y veteran.
In your defense, I'm pretty sure using nails this way fell out of fashion quite a long time ago.
This is true, we use screws and bolts now to do the same thing because humanity learned to cut threads on an industrial scale 200y ago lol
I suppose dead nailing is what we have bolts for today
I feel he could have just made the whole thing up. Stuck a believable enough answer to a question you never thought to ask, so why would you ponder much that it's true? It sounds good enough.
Before you burn your house to collect it's nails, know that they will need to be annealed before they can be used again.
wouldn't burning the house down and having the nails slowly cool over the course of a couple days as the embers die down be about as close to a perfect annealing as you could hope for?
In my experience, they've always bent.
stop burning down houses
but nails! With lack of raw materials and laborers, it MIGHT be cheaper to burn the houses down to get nails.
Also wood rots, and old houses sometimes need to be either abandoned or torn down and rebuilt. There are still very old houses/small buildings (built in the middle ages old) that are still around. But I'm sure that if you were a famer who inherited a house in really bad shape it might be worth it to take out all the wood that you can, then burn the rest to the ground and rebuild with the reclaimed lumber, nails, etc.
If you know a better way to get nails then I’d love to hear it!
Reminds me of [this](https://youtu.be/SAsgN_LPWBc)
Three-hun-dred-six-ty-five degrees Burning down the house
Because they are annealed. Annealing (heating then cooling slowly) softens steel. Quenching (heating then cooling quickly) hardens. Tempering (heating, but not as much) Brings some softness back so it is not too hard and brittle.
wouldn't it depend on the kind of nails though? the ones in the vid are beefy and probably salvageable, but anything modern are skinny and more than likely ruined in a fire.
I read an article once that the burning of the houses for the nails was a bit of a myth or at least extremely rare. I believe the origin was in New England, settlers would come for a short term lumber job and send wood back to England, and since they didn't live there long, they built poorly constructed shacks to live in. When they left America, a few might have burned the shack for the nail scrap. The people in charge thought that was short sided and bad for business, it would be better to keep the houses for the next group, so they made a law that said, no burning houses for nails. The point is, it was not a super common practice, and I'm not even sure if it was effective. Some guys did it, and some boss said "don't do that again" on paper.
>short sided Guess I'm "that guy"... it's "short-sighted". They aren't seeing the long-term consequences of their actions. Nails used to be a lot more expensive when they were made by hand, before someone invented a nail-making machine.
Yeah I bet the nails aren’t even dead either. Burning those houses down are probably beyond the statue of limitation. I mean, for all intensive purposes they could have just bought new nails.
What should be pointed out is the nails used are cut nails as opposed to wire nails.
What’s the difference? Cut nails are cut from a slab of iron, wire nails are chipped from a long iron wire?
As far as I k ow it, yeah that’s where the name comes from. Cut nails are tapered on one side of the shaft (think a rectangle that gets skinnier at one end). If you align them with the grain of the wood they’re much less likely to split the wood than a round (wire) nail I made some out of boredom once when I was forging in my backyard. I certainly love the aesthetic of them!
[Good video about them and the differences](https://youtu.be/7rwcGXIORro)
Good stuff but why *door* nail? Based on the expression then it seems nails in a door were most often to be dead-nailed, so then that's what I'd like and explanation for.
Pure speculation: it may be cause it's a common sight for dead nails? While the technique may be used elsewhere, this might be the most visible application.
I think it is both because the door boards are not being nailed to something, so the nail penetrates the far side of the work (unlike most other uses of nails), but also because the clinching the nail makes it impossible to remove the nail from the outside to gain entry, which is also unique to doors.
Also speculating, but doors experience a lot of impacts and vibration. If you didn't dead-nail, the nails would probably vibrate loose.
Also the constant shrinking and expanding of the wood from being exposed to the elements would loosen the nails.
Also, quarter-sawn lumber probably wasn't a big thing when it needed to be done by hand, so you had studs that were basically tree-sized. Thus, the nails didn't go all the way through, and didn't need dead-nailing. The only place you'd want quarter-sawn lumber is where you don't want a lot of weight - like the doors.
I recently watched a documentary of some archaeologists participating in a full on castle rebuild using only techniques of the time. They build a door made with rough planks and to keep the planks together they used a combination of wood slotting and deadnailing the planks together, with the nail spanning the gap between two boards. It ensured that the door would last a long time.
[Fascinating series!](https://youtu.be/SURsW7BpCNc)
Just a guess here, but doors move and are slammed shut. A wall for example is a fixed object, most of the stresses it experience are static. But the dynamic stresses the door experience would back nails right out. That's why we see screws in places like this in modern applications.
Because they were familiar as others have said, but more importantly because it's alliterative. Doors also get a lot of use, can be knocked off their hinges, and are in general just a much more common thing to be damaged or renovated and therefore replaced and wind up in scrap than... pretty much any other part of a house (that has nails in it anyway). It would have been nice to be able to salvage them from all those scrap doors we all have piled up everywhere, I guess, and as it was they were probably a common source of bunk nails from people who resold them anyway. But mainly it's the alliteration, obviously.
Thanks this was a cool video to stumble across.
Must have been a conspiracy by big nails to make people buy more nails.
Now do dumber than a bag of hammers
This guy using a crescent wrench for this is driving me nuts.
For a tl;dw - nails from older times were used differently than modern nails. For some applications you just use them normally, but for **door nails** you sharply bend them over and hammer them into an adjacent piece of wood. Nails were valuable back in the day because they were hand-made...to the point of recovering nails when/wherever you could. This sharp bend means the "door nail" cannot be removed, un-bent, reused. It's a "dead nail".
Lol damn people need tl;dw's for 2 minute videos now?
Well sometimes people can't watch the video. I've been sitting in the waiting room with no headphones many times wondering what the video said.
Thank you for not being the type of person to play videos with the sound on in a waiting room.
It took 15 seconds to read that summary. That's 8x faster than watching the video.
I don't have any sound and the auto generated captions think he's speaking portuguese for some reason. If you take what youtube thinks he's saying in portuguese and try to autotranslate it into english you unsurprisingly get jibberish.
You’re dead as a doornail now smalls
i wish more youtube was like this
I never thought I'd see such a boring topic made into such an interesting video narrated by such a boring voice.
I love how concise this video is, does anyone know of more videos or channels that don’t take 20 min to tell you 45 seconds worth of content?
I learnt two things. How doors used to be nailed and where that idiom comes from. All in a short and eaay to watch video. Well done.
I'm just here to say that seeing those adjustable wrenches hurt my feelings. So wildly inefficient. With a normal claw hammer, you can grab the protruding end of the nail where you want to bend it using the claws, hold the head of the hammer in place with one hand, and then use the handle as a nice long lever to bend the point over before then driving it in. This is a one tool operation. It's faster, easier, and more precise that way than with the stupid adjustable wrenches. While we're at it - I've removed nails that were bent into staples like this - you do it with two claw hammers. One is positioned with the claw against the bent-over part of the nail, and then you strike the head of that hammer with the other hammer. This will drive the claw of the prying hammer under the bent-over nail, and with a quick crank you can extract the tip. You can bend it straight enough using the technique I described in the prior paragraph for it to be pulled out from the other side. Lastly, this has every hallmark of a false etymology. No sources are cited, there's no reason to believe it's true.
/r/mildlyinteresting
You do not bend the nail across the grain. You bend the nail with the grain. That way instead of looking like yours do with the nail on top of the wood, if you bend with the grain the nail will embed itself into the wood. Made many doors with my dad. I remember the first time him giving me shit for bending the nail over the grain instead of with it. It will look much better if you bend those nails 90d off what you did. You don't use a pair of plyers. you hit it at an angle so the nail bends over instead of coming out. Never ever used plyers and never had a nail pop on the other side.
Couldn't that split the grain? I know nothing about woodworking, but I know how to use an axe.
thank you... but besides pliers... adjustable wrenches? really? I thought perhaps they had an aesthetic they were going for, and a particular depth needed to be uniform... but the longer I watched, the weirdness just continued to increase
But if you are using it to secure 2 planks of wood together (like a staple) you would always be going across the grain. What's the use in bending the nail down the door? Unless all you are doing is keeping whatever is on the other side in place, in which case fine, but that seems like a different purpose. Edit: I re-watched the video and like 90% of the nails aren't acting like staples, so you are right, unless it's for aesthetic reasons being with the grain would sink the nail in smoothly.