Would you like to buy some water-front property in
Arizona too?
Though very cute, the story of the "brass monkey"
coloquialism is absurd at best.
Aside from the fact that cannon balls would have been
held in place much more cheaply and easily with wood
and no book has ever documented finding a "brass
monkey" on a wreckage or the oxford dictionary having
a description of such a device, the idea is obsurd.
Warships never kept balls sitting around on deck, they
much too valuable a commodity to take a chance on a
rogue storm throwing them over. They were kept in
storage below decks except when in combat, and on
docked tourist attractions like when you go on the
U.S.S. Constitution.
The term "cold enough to freeze the balls off of a
brass monkey" has much more innocuous representation
in literature. Appearances of the coloquialism appear
in the 19th century, and much of the monkey anatomy
was used to describe intemperate climate e.g. cold
enough to freeze the whiskers, tail, nose, ears etc.
off of a brass monkey. And it was not used expressly
for low temperature. And it wasn't uncommon to "sweat
a brass monkey" or "hot enough to scald the throat of
a brass monkey".
My mother ascribed it to the fact that people used
door-stops in the shapes of animals (most commonly the
monkey) in the late colonial period. A heavey brass
device which would prop open your screen doors in the
summer. When temperatures would drop suddenly, they
would say "You better close the doors. It's getting
cold enough to freeze the balls off of the brass
monkey."
As you can guess, my mother is on heavy medication,
and also believes that Eisenhouer is still President.
I bet you also belive that one about how "giving the
finger" came about too?
-Terry
Interesting conversation! I had always heard that the
opposite was
true -
ie that the brass 'monkey' contracted more during the
extreme cold,
while
the iron balls did not. Therefore the brass tray
(monkey) shrank to
the
point of being too small to contain the balls,
allowing them to fall
off ?!
Cheers, Fred
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