Thursday, July 25, 2013

Dead as a Doornail

Woke up this morning and one of the two garage door openers is dead as a doornail.  (interesting saying, "dead as a door nail").  I love when an unexpected expense rears it's ugly head.  It normally pops up just after you've spent lots and lots of money on something else.  In this case, we just finished painting and carpeting two rooms.  So when cash is tight you can always count on the "unexpected expense" to tag you and say, "You're It!".  Not only do you need to deal with the expense, but there is also the inconvenience of calling a repair guy, making an appointment, and getting them out to the house.  Then you can always get the dagger when they tell you the parts are "out of stock" and need to be ordered.  Well, there is not much you can do about things like these.  It is best to not get too worked up over these small annoyances.  You really need to take them in stride and move on.  They keep coming and all you can do is hope that none are too serious.

As far as "dead as a doornail" goes, this is what I found:

William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know.

No comments:

Post a Comment