Did you know this? I quote from An Authoritative Source. “England is old and small, and they started running out of places to bury people [back in the 1500s]. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a ‘bone-house’ and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought 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.'”
That’s “true,” folks, as true as it gets, in some circles.
But let’s talk about those phrases again, okay? Saved by the bell, dead ringer, and the graveyard shift.
Naturally, “saved by the bell” is a phrase from boxing. According to The Phrase Finder, it began to be used outside of boxing in the mid-19th century. But two centuries prior to that, several notable people expressed their fear of being buried alive. The great musician Chopin essentially said to make sure the doctors kill him once they believe he is already dead. Someone of that day invented coffins with bell towers so that their occupants could ring for service if they revived after being buried. “There’s no evidence to show that these coffins were ever put to use,” Gary Martin, the phrase finder, reports.
“Graveyard shift” is workplace terminology, originating in the United States over 100 years ago. There’s a record of a variation of this term 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.”
“Dead ringer” has a two-fold origin. Ringer is term for a horse which looks exactly like another. Apparently, horse owners had reasons to give false impressions to bookies, so they would trot a ringer around in public so that onlookers could make their conclusions before the race. “Dead,” in this case, means “exact” as in dead on, dead right, and dead center. There are more layers of meaning on the term “ringer,” which you can read on The Phrase Finder’s page.
Good post. The internet has made it possible to spread misinformation faster and more widely than ever before in history.
I think there was a book or something not long ago that told how premature burial was actually very common in earlier ages, as evidenced by marks of damage on the insides of coffins, and skeletons found in odd positions.
The author of Vampires, Burial and Death, which I reviewed recently, says that’s mostly poppycock. The normal process of decomposition probably accounts for the majority of such phenomena.
Thanks for this posting. I’m teaching American Lit next semester and of course there’s Poe, with perhaps his “Premature Burial” story as a selection.
Oh, good. That would make for a good, light spot in a lecture. I looked up this information because I was on vacation recently and a tour guide through out a story about people fearing live burial and the making of coffins with bells as being the origin of “saved by the bell” and “graveyard shift.” I thought to ask her about her source at the time, but my wife thought she just made it up or didn’t care if was true. It was a fun point in a tour guide monologue, so who cares if it’s true.