The phrase “Saved by the Bell” might make you think of a lucky escape, like when a school bell rings just in time to save you from answering a tough question. There’s also a spooky story about it being linked to people being buried alive. The tale goes that people were buried with a string tied to a bell above ground, so if they woke up, they could ring it and be saved. However, this story isn’t true. The phrase actually comes from boxing, where a bell rings to end a round, saving a boxer from further punches.
When someone looks exactly like someone else, we call them a “dead ringer.” Some say this comes from the idea of a person ringing a bell from inside a coffin. But that’s not true. The word “ringer” originally meant a look-alike used in competitions to cheat. Combine that with “dead,” meaning exact, and you get “dead ringer”—a perfect match, not a spooky bell story.
The “graveyard shift” is the late-night work shift, but it has nothing to do with graveyards. It actually comes from jobs like mining and gambling, where people worked through the night. Sailors also had a “graveyard watch” from midnight to 4 AM, named for the quietness or the disasters that could happen during those hours.
The word “wake,” as in a funeral wake, has a story about people drinking from lead cups and falling into a coma, only to “wake” later. But that’s not true. The word “wake” comes from old words meaning vigil or watch. By the 15th century, it referred to watching over a body before a funeral, not waking from a lead-induced sleep.
When we talk about the “upper crust,” we mean the top tier of society. Some say it comes from the best part of a loaf of bread being given to important people. But there’s little evidence for this. The phrase was used in the 16th century to describe the Earth’s surface and didn’t refer to people until the 19th century.
“Bring home the bacon” means to earn money, but it’s not about showing off pork. Some think it comes from winning a pig at a fair or a medieval marriage custom. However, the phrase first appeared in 1906 when a mother told her boxer son to “bring home the bacon,” and it caught on from there.
This phrase warns against losing something valuable while getting rid of something unwanted. The story goes that in the 16th century, families bathed in order, and by the time it was the baby’s turn, the water was so dirty that the baby could be lost. But this isn’t true. The phrase comes from a German proverb and wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
When it’s pouring rain, we say it’s “raining cats and dogs.” There’s a story about animals falling from roofs during storms, but that’s unlikely. A simpler explanation is that cats and dogs represent intensity, like a fierce storm. Other theories involve French words and old texts, but none are certain. It’s just a fun way to describe heavy rain.
Thanks for exploring these phrase origins! If you know any interesting true origins, feel free to share them. See you next time!
Choose one of the debunked phrase origins and create a comic strip that illustrates both the myth and the true origin. Use your creativity to make it engaging and humorous. Share your comic strip with the class and explain why the true origin is more believable.
Form two teams and choose a phrase from the article. One team will argue in favor of the myth, while the other will present the true origin. Use evidence and reasoning to support your arguments. After the debate, discuss as a class which side was more convincing and why.
Pick a phrase from the article and write a short story that incorporates both the myth and the true origin. Your story should creatively blend the two narratives, providing an entertaining twist. Share your story with a partner and discuss how the myths can sometimes be more captivating than the truth.
Research another common phrase not mentioned in the article and find out its true origin. Create a presentation that includes the phrase, its myth, and the actual origin. Present your findings to the class and compare it to the phrases discussed in the article.
Work in small groups to create a skit that acts out both the myth and the true origin of a phrase from the article. Use props and costumes to make your skit engaging. Perform your skit for the class and discuss how dramatizing the origins helps in understanding the phrases better.
**Sanitized Transcript:**
“Saved by the Bell” is a fun expression for lucky high schoolers; it’s also a classic sitcom. According to legend, it refers to people being mistakenly buried alive after stories emerged about coffins with scratch marks on the inside. Undertakers supposedly came up with the idea to use life-saving signaling systems—essentially, a string tied to the wrist of the possibly deceased that led up through the ground to a bell. If the corpse turned out to be not so dead after all and started moving around, the bell would ring, and the person could be saved.
While this is a fun, albeit morbid, etymological origin, most of that story is probably untrue. Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of mentalfloss.com, and this is the list show. Today, I’ll be debunking the origins of several more common phrases, including two other coffin-related expressions.
Let’s get started! The fear of being buried alive was indeed a real concern; famous individuals like Hans Christian Andersen, George Washington, and August Renoir were said to have suffered from this fear. However, there isn’t any proof that these fears were based on real incidents. In the late 1890s, a medical journal surveyed a group of doctors and experts, and according to their report, none had ever known or heard of a verified case of burial alive. They considered accounts of such occurrences totally unworthy of credence or serious attention.
If people weren’t actually being buried alive, it’s hard to see how this origin story could be based in fact. To put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, the phrase didn’t appear in print until the late 19th century—about 100 years after safety coffins began popping up. This particular usage wasn’t even in reference to a premature burial; it was used in the context of boxing. “Saved by the Bell” simply refers to the end-of-round bell that could save a boxer from getting beaten up. Slightly less morbid!
While we still have images of people waking up in buried coffins in our heads, let’s talk about the phrase “dead ringer.” Today, we use it to refer to a person or thing that looks very much like another—a double, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary. Many believe it, like “Saved by the Bell,” originated in reference to a not-quite-dead person ringing a bell from inside a coffin. Once again, it’s a cute story, but it doesn’t pass the fact check.
The word “ringer” refers to a look-alike person or animal brought into a competition to secure a victory. It was derived from the phrase “to ring the changes,” an old slang term meaning to substitute one thing for another fraudulently. Combine “ringer” with the adjective “dead,” meaning exact, and you get “dead ringer”—not a dead person ringing.
Those aren’t the only two phrases wrongly attributed to dubious tales of burial gone wrong. There’s also the “graveyard shift.” Some claim this phrase comes from the name given to graveyard workers who had to work night shifts to potentially rescue someone who was buried alive. Unfortunately for those with this fear, the expression has a few likely sources, but none involve a graveyard.
“Graveyard shift” dates back to the late 19th century, and when it appeared, it referred to things like coal mines and gambling houses. The after-midnight, early morning run is called the graveyard shift. An 1888 newspaper article about a gambling house noted this, and a 1906 article mentioned that miners worked a graveyard shift lasting from 11 PM to 3 AM. Sailors, meanwhile, did something called a “graveyard watch” from midnight to 4 AM while the rest of the crew was asleep. Some say it was known as the graveyard watch because of how quiet the ship was during that time, while others claim it got the name because disasters often occurred during those hours.
So, it seems like any number of workers doing their jobs during the dead of night is the source of this expression, not someone sitting in a literal graveyard waiting for a bell to ring.
While we’re still on the subject of dead bodies not being so dead, let’s talk about the origin of the word “wake,” as in funeral wake. Here’s the fun story that often gets told: a few centuries ago, people used to drink out of lead cups. The stories go that putting booze in these vessels created a lead-laced punch so potent that it would cause people to collapse on the way home and not wake up for days. Passersby would presume these poor souls were dead and deliver the body to their family’s home to prepare for the funeral. The body would sit in a room in the house for a few days as the family hung around, hoping their loved one would wake back to life from their lead-induced coma.
However, there are a few holes in this story. Lead poisoning doesn’t happen all at once, as this story would have you believe; instead, it occurs over time. Drinking whiskey from a lead cup all night is not going to lead to a corpse-like knockout—that’s probably just alcohol poisoning. In reality, the word “wake” has origins going back several centuries. It’s related to the Old Norse word “vaka,” which means vigil, and the Old High German “wachta,” which means watch. By the 15th century, “wake” began to be used in reference to the watching of the body of a loved one, as well as the drinking, feasting, and other observances incidental to this.
So, the lead cup story doesn’t hold water—or booze.
Now, let’s step away from graveyards and dead bodies and talk about something a little less morbid: bread. When we talk about the “upper crust,” we’re usually referring to the crème de la crème of society—the aristocracy, celebrities, rich people. Some origin stories for the phrase suggest it comes from the desirable qualities of the top part of a literal loaf of bread. Back in the old days, bread was supposedly split among people based on their status: workers would get the bottom, the burnt part; the family would get the middle chunk; and guests would get the top, the upper crust.
Why the top crust of bread was considered the best is unclear; I personally am a fan of the middle. However, there’s only one reference to a custom like this, and that’s in a 1460 book. The passage summarized in English reads, in part, “Take a loaf of bread, pare the edges, cut the upper crust for your lord.” That’s the only reference to literal bread crust used in relation to a member of the upper class for hundreds of years.
In the mid-16th century, the phrase was also used to refer to the outermost layer of the Earth’s surface. The reference to the upper class didn’t become commonplace until the 19th century. Interestingly, it was also used as slang for a person’s head or their hat. It seems more likely that “upper crust” was connected to upper classes simply because it’s the top, rather than a reference to any specific bread-sharing practice.
“Bring home the bacon”—the story goes that pork products used to be pretty difficult to get, so if you were able to buy some, you would often hang it in your home for your guests to see how impressive it was that you brought home the bacon. However, that story is likely not true. Some trace the origin of “bring home the bacon” to the tradition of catching a greased swine at a county fair and then getting to take it home. Others believe it comes from a custom referenced in Chaucer, in which married couples made a vow that if a year and a day after saying “I do,” they could promise they didn’t regret their marriage, they were given some pork as a reward.
However, these are unlikely too. The phrase “bring home the bacon” actually didn’t appear in writing until 1906. A motherly boxer was quoted in a newspaper telling her son to “bring home the bacon.” It became popular among sportswriters after that and likely spread from there.
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” is a very specific piece of advice, but it has an understandable meaning. It’s a warning to not get rid of something valuable when discarding something unwanted. The story goes that in the 16th century, the order in which a family took a bath followed a certain hierarchy: the man of the house would get into the big tub of clean hot water, next came any other sons or men in the house, then the women would bathe, followed by the children, and bringing up the rear, the babies. By that point, as you might imagine, the water was no longer nice and clean; it was so murky that a baby could get lost in it. So mothers would be told, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
However, this story is almost surely not true. For one, a big bath of hot water in the 16th century was not a common occurrence, thanks to the fact that people had to lug buckets of water up from the river. In fact, most baths were more like sponge baths. The English version of the expression, which dates to the 1800s, came from a German proverb that roughly translates as “to empty out the child with the bath.” That first appeared in a satirical work from the 16th century, so it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously and had nothing to do with babies actually being thrown out with the bath.
As for why it became so popular, well, if you had a choice between “don’t throw away the good with the bad” or “don’t throw the baby away with the bathwater,” which would you choose? The meaning is the same, but the former conjures up slightly less vivid imagery.
You hear that it’s raining cats and dogs out there. Have you ever thought about how odd that phrase is? Well, there’s an interesting tall tale people like to throw around about it. It goes like this: once upon a time, people’s roofs consisted of straw on top of wood, and many animals lived up there because it was warmer—mice, rats, bugs, cats, dogs—an entire zoo living up there. As the story goes, when it got really rainy, the animals would slip off the thatch and fall from the roof. Now it’s raining cats and dogs! Cute and sad, but there isn’t much evidence for this origin story.
While some animals may have taken shelter in thatched roofs, it’s not really clear how rain would cause them to come flying down. A less complicated theory from etymologists attributes the phrase to the age-old rivalry between cats and dogs. Doing anything like cats and dogs means something of high intensity, so it wouldn’t be a huge leap to describe heavy rain as “cats and dogs.”
Some other more speculative theories are out there as well. One is that the phrase comes from the French word for waterfall, “katadup,” but some etymologists aren’t convinced that theory is legit. Another potential origin might be found in a 1592 text that reads, “instead of thunderbolts, shoot if nothing but dog bolts or cat bolts.” What are dog bolts and cat bolts, you ask? They’re heavy metal bolts used for securing gates and holding together pieces of wood, so a heavy storm might have been equated to the sound or feeling of being pelted by heavy metal tools.
But again, not all etymologists are convinced that’s where “it’s raining cats and dogs” comes from. Maybe it’s just kind of fun to describe a really intense storm with this evocative phrase.
Thanks for watching the list show! If you know of an interesting true origin for a popular expression, drop it in the comments below. We’ll see you next time!
Phrase – A small group of words standing together as a conceptual unit, typically forming a component of a clause. – In the poem, the phrase “a sea of troubles” is used to describe overwhelming challenges.
Origin – The point or place where something begins or is created; the source. – The origin of the word “literature” can be traced back to Latin.
Story – An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. – The story of Romeo and Juliet is a classic tale of love and tragedy.
Bell – A device that makes a ringing sound, often used to signal the start or end of a period of time. – The school bell rang, signaling the end of English class.
Shift – A change in position, direction, or focus. – There was a noticeable shift in the tone of the novel after the main character faced a major setback.
Wake – The aftermath or consequences of an event, often used metaphorically in literature. – In the wake of the protagonist’s decision, the story took an unexpected turn.
Society – A community of people living together and interacting with each other. – The novel explores how society influences individual behavior and beliefs.
Earn – To receive something, such as money or recognition, in return for effort or achievement. – The author worked hard to earn a reputation as a respected writer.
Valuable – Having great worth, especially in terms of usefulness or importance. – The teacher emphasized that reading diverse books is valuable for developing empathy and understanding.
Rain – Water that falls from the sky in drops, often used symbolically in literature. – In the novel, the rain symbolizes renewal and hope for the characters.
