Heavier than a Dead Minister

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Chelsea Northrup.

Hi, Chelsea.

I’m calling from Binghamton, New York, and I would like to know about the phrase heavier than a dead minister. My husband uses it frequently, but neither of us understand why a dead minister is so heavy.

So, Chelsea, just to repeat, you’re from where in New York?

Binghamton, New York.

Binghamton, New York. Gotcha. And your husband says heavier than a dead minister?

Yeah.

Meaning very heavy or heavy beyond all belief?

Yes. Very, very heavy.

Very, very heavy. Wow. Does he have any idea where he picked that up?

Both of his grandfathers are from near Watertown, New York, and they both used it.

So he learned it from them, I guess.

Is this said with kind of jocularity, or is this a serious thing?

It sounds kind of, might be slightly humorous to me, although it’s morbid.

I think it is humorous, but he uses it whenever he talks about something really heavy, and so does his grandfather.

We’re talking like a refrigerator or a piano or something like that.

Like a dead cow, yeah.

His grandfather was a dairy farmer.

Wow, and how does he feel about ministers?

I don’t know.

They were both relatively respectful and religious, so I don’t know how they feel about dead ministers.

It’s not exclusive to your husband or his family. It has had some history to it.

I find uses of it going back to the 1800s. It pops up first, as far as I can tell, in print.

In a Kansas newspaper, there’s somebody who’s claiming that they were a slave raised in Kentucky, and they write, at the log rollings of my state, someone attacking a large oak log would say, this is heavier than a dead minister.

And this writer is using this in comparison to a political foe, who apparently is very huge and perhaps is the kind of person who has lived off the fat of others’ labor.

And so a lot of the uses that I see of heavier than a dead minister, and sometimes it’s dead preacher or dead priest, a lot of the uses seem to be suggesting that they’re overweight because they don’t do real work.

They’re not from farm stock. They’re not out there tending to the cattle, and they’re not there working in the fields, and they’re showing up at other people’s houses for dinner every night and eating the best pies and the best meat and so forth.

And, you know, this fits into a long tradition of poking fun at the clergy and the church in Europe, where often the priests would be well-fed.

There’s an Italian pasta called strozza preti, which literally translates as priest stranglers. And the idea was that a priest would come to your house at dinnertime or lunchtime on Sundays, and this would be a kind of pasta that you could fill them up with.

Or, of course, there’s the sweet eggy dessert from Portugal called Barriga de Freira, which means nuns’ tummies. It was a reference to the idea that nuns were better fed than other people who weren’t connected with the church.

So a lot of this isn’t about wanting ministers to be dead, and it’s not about imagining a dead minister. It’s just talking about them as big people, larger than your average folk.

Very interesting.

So, Chelsea, that’s what we know. So it’s got some history to it. It’s about overfed clergy.

Thank you.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for listening.

Yep, thank you very much.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

There’s another version of that, heavier than a dead minister down a well, which suggests the awkwardness of how did it get in the well? How do you get it out? It’s even harder to lift out of a well.

And a lot of times the varieties, the variations on this expression are about the social complications as well as the physical complications, like the moral complications of having a person of the cloth who is now deceased.

Like, what does this all mean?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So there’s a real awkwardness to it, right?

And some people have tried to extrapolate things like, if even a minister can die, what does it say about the rest of us who are further from God?

Oh, wow.

So it’s a sermon waiting to be written.

That is heavy.

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