Replies

Rockpile wins the brass ring.....whole nine yards refered to lenght of 50 caliber ammo belts for aircraft mounted guns in WWII

As for Brass Monkey...........

In the heyday of the sailing ship, every ship had to have cannon for protection. Cannon of the times required round iron cannon balls. The master wanted to store the cannon balls such that they could be of instant use when needed, yet not roll around the gun deck. The solution was to stack them in a square based pyramid next to the cannon. The top level of the stack had one ball, the next level down had four, the next had nine, the next had 16, and so on. Four levels would provide a stack of 30 cannon balls. The only real problem was how to keep the bottom level from sliding out from under the weight of the higher levels. To do this, they devised a small plate ("monkey") with one rounded indentation for each cannon ball in the bottom layer. When iron was used to make this plate ("monkey"), the cannon balls would rust to the plate. As a result, these plates were made of brass to prevent this problem-- thus the name "brass monkey." When temperature falls, brass contracts in size faster than iron. As it got cold on the gun decks, the indentations in the brass monkey would get smaller than the iron cannon balls they were holding. If the temperature got cold enough, the bottom layer would pop out of the indentations spilling the entire pyramid over the deck. Thus it was, quite literally, "COLD ENOUGH TO FREEZE THE BALLS OFF A BRASS MONKEY." And all this time some of you thought we were talking dirty. —Author Unknown

And Archy.....as to the Missing Hmong ect ect , I suspect that some very rich Christans In Action got a cut of that Chiefs miscount......:o)

Stay Safe !

"Rockpile wins the brass ring.....whole nine yards refered to lenght of 50 caliber ammo belts for aircraft mounted guns in WWII"

Hi Squantos, One of the flying magazines two or three years ago had a debate going about this topic. Some were claiming 30 cal WW I belts, some 50 cal and others various different explanations. But they were all wrong.

The phrase refers to chain in muzzle loading naval guns. I doubt they had 50 cal machine guns during the reign of Henry VIII :}

You know, we sure see a lot of dogmatic statements and explanations of things nowadays that are just flat wrong. Also see a lot of quotations attributed to famous people who did not make them. But maybe that's not new, just spreads faster with the web I guess.

One real famous example you hear all the time is about something having "bugs" in it came from the first computer. Only problem is this is an old saying that derived from literally having bugs in it--like some Army chow. It definitely predates the 40s.

Another word was doughboy. Everbody thinks of it as dating from WW I but it goes back to the Mexican War. Or to use that one in a sentence:

Rockpile's Great-great Grandfather was a doughboy gravel-cruncher when he was Captain Arthur MacArthur's First Sergeant in New Mexico Territory.

Whoever thinks that cannon balls were stacked next to the cannon like a pyramid aboard ships... or even on fort walls has not seen a cannon rigged for either use... or fired WITH a cannon ball in it. Movie representations fire blank loads and the recoil is totally artificial.

Cannon have a disconcerting reaction to being fired... they recoil... violently. Cannons on ship or in forts were secured to the bulkhead or to the fort wall with large ropes that were connected to rings on the cannon carriage and then looped and tied around the knob like bulb on the rear of the cannon (to prevent the cannon becoming "loose" and careening around the deck). Even with this rope to contol recoil, the cannon could bounce around quite a bit. Stacking the balls nearby in such a manner would result in all 30 of the balls rolling around the deck if the cannon struck even one.

I have built several scratch built models of warships with cannons fully rigged and a couple of cannon models complete with decks. In all that I have researched, the cannon balls were kept in a line in a wooden board with holes cut into it somewhere toward the mid-deck... or next to the gunwale away from the cannon rigging.

It is only on battlefields or field camps next to field artillary pieces do you see the pyramid stack where the cannon balls have been moved from the caisons for convenience.

Rockpile wins the brass ring.....whole nine yards refered to lenght of 50 caliber ammo belts for aircraft mounted guns in WWII

My copy of "Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" disputes that. It claims:

. . it arose among construction workers, the nine yards referring to the maximum cpapcity a cement-mixer truck can carry - nine cubic yards of cement.