Dead as a Doornail

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hi, this is Jennifer Briggs from Crawfordville, Florida.

Hi, Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Hey, Jennifer, what’s up?

Well, I come from a family of engineers, and we were at a dinner, and someone said, well, that’s as dead as a doornail.

And the engineers couldn’t figure out what a doornail was, so they kind of took a different route with it.

And I guess there may have been beer served there, but somebody said maybe it’s a Dorn Ale and it’s bad beer.

So it’s dead as a Dorn Ale instead of a Dorn Ale.

That’s funny.

I don’t know where that – so we couldn’t figure out that.

Oh, my God.

There may have been beer served.

I know how that goes.

Mayhaps, I think she said.

And engineers and beer.

And they probably made it themselves given that they’re engineers, right?

Lots of copper tubing.

Right.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, lots of sterilization and bottle caps.

Measuring everything.

Okay, I’m getting the picture.

So they actually came up with an etymology of Adorn Ale?

Yes, and it was bad.

They made bad beer, so it was dead like flat.

Okay.

Oh, wow.

So what would Adorn be in this?

This is a misdivision, we call this, where you take a word and you divide it incorrectly into false component parts.

My brother did a job share engineering job in Germany, and I think there may be an Adorn, Germany or something.

I don’t know where he came up with that.

A charming little town called Adorn.

Where they keep making their ale even though it’s terrible.

That’s great, but it’s wrong.

Yeah, it’s not true. Funny, but not true.

I kind of figured that.

There are a couple of stories about the phrase dead as a doornail.

One of them is to think about those big medieval doors that you see in Europe.

I mean, this is an expression that goes all the way back to the 1350s at least.

And if you think about those big medieval doors in Europe, those big nails hammered into them look pretty much stuck in there.

They’re immovable, right?

Yeah, yeah.

They’re not going anywhere.

So they’re basically dead.

And in a lot of those doors, the knocker would actually knock on the head of one of those big nails.

And so that nail is really going to be dead because it’s getting hit all the time.

So that’s one theory.

Like unusable again or something?

Well, they’re just…

Dead means fixed in place.

Yeah.

Like think of a dead stop, coming to a dead stop.

Yeah, yeah.

There’s another term in carpentry that has to do with a nail being dead.

And that’s if you hammer it all the way into a piece of wood and then you clinch it on the other side by hammering the other side of the nail.

Then it’s in there dead.

So you can’t get it out unless you curve that pointy end or somehow have the super strength to yank it out.

Yeah.

So it may be a pun on the word dead.

And that’s how alliteration helps keep it alive too, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because there have been other phrases in English like dead is a herring because most people experienced herring as dead in the store.

Or dead as mutton, I think, is another one.

Dead as mutton, right.

Yeah, but dead as a doornail is more alliterative, as you said.

So that’s the best theory we have.

There are other theories floating around about where the doornail comes from.

And now there’s a new one.

Now there’s a new one.

A doornail.

But more than likely, it’s this actual particular kind of heavy-duty nail banged into a door.

Okay.

Well, I’m surprised they didn’t come up with that.

Well, they’re engineers, right?

Unless they’re medieval architectural engineers.

Right.

No, they are not.

All mechanical. Everything’s machined.

Right, right. They probably wanted something a little more complicated and elegant, right?

Right. Oh, that’s funny.

Cool. Thanks, Jennifer.

Well, I will pass that on. Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

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