NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Sextant frames
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 May 22, 21:25 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 May 22, 21:25 -0700
Jim, you wrote: "Historically, the brass monkey was what supported the local store of cannonballs. I think that the assertion was that in extreme cold, the cannonballs would shrink enough to fall off the supporting monkey." Yeah, this is a "tall tale" of language and etymology. There was no such supporting frame called a brass monkey. And: " I can't imagine that such a minuscule change would affect the static stability of a cannonball on the monkey. Sorry to throw cold water on a colorful phrase." Yep. Good call. The physics is clearly wrong. It makes no sense. In case you're curious, the linguistics is also wrong. If you search through Google Books, for example, for the phrase "brass monkey" in the period before the 20th century, the most common phrase is "freeze the tail off a brass monkey", which fits nicely for this 'tall tale'. ;-) And by the way, none of those old book references mention cannon balls! The thing that's "cute" about this particular folk etymology is that it's trying to suggest that the balls in question are not the obvious balls that the phrase implies, as if to say that a seemingly coarse expression is only coarse in the dirty mind of the reader. In fact, they probably are just those balls since the other variants of this "freeze the ---- off a brass monkey" usually involve the monkey's body parts. Here's the lowdown on this one from snopes.com: http://www.snopes.com/language/stories/brass.asp -FER PS: and btw, in the same maritime language category, "posh" doesn't come from "port out, starboard home"... but "btw" does come from "by the way". :-) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---