Meaning:
Something that's as dead as a doornail is absolutely, unquestionably, unequivocally dead.
Background:
If you’re like me, you first came across this phrase on page one of Charles Dickens’ classic novella A Christmas Carol (1843). I think it’s probably this single paragraph that made me fall in love with this author’s work:
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.
As Dickens himself says, though, the phrase is considerably older than when the author penned this famous text.
William Shakespeare employed it two centuries before Dickens. In
Henry IV, Part 2 (1592), the rebel Jack Cade states: "Look on me well: I have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more (Act 4, Scene 10)." The playwright uses it again in the next act as well. (“Falstaff: What! is the old king dead? Pistol: As a nail in a door.”)
We’ll have to go even further back in time to discover the idiom’s first use in print, however. The earliest mention of it is in an anonymous French poem, “
Guillaume de Palerne,” in a 1350 translation by
William Langland: “For but ich haue bote of mi bale I am ded as dorenayl.” Langland plagiarized the phrase, incorporating it into his own work
The Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman (1370-1390): “Fey withouten fait is febelore þen nougt, And ded as a dore-nayl.” (Translation: Faith without works is feebler than nothing, and dead as a doornail.)
Interestingly, there is such a thing as a dead doornail. In medieval times, iron nails were a valuable commodity. They were so highly prized that it was not unheard of for nails to be stolen out of construction projects, or even finished buidings. There are stories about houses being burned down so that the nails could be recovered. Carpenters therefore developed the practice of “deadnailing,” whereby a long nail is driven all the way through the item (e.g., door), with a significant portion of it sticking out the other side. The pointy end was then bent once near the tip, forming a hook, and then bent a second time at its base, driving the hook into the wood (the result looks like a staple). (Check out this fascinating
demonstration of the technique by blacksmith and craftsman
Malcolm Powless-Lynes.) Not only did this keep the nails from being removed, but straightening out the bends would weaken the nail to such an extent that it couldn’t be used again — and it was therefore “dead.” Doors were the items that were most likely to have dead nails, spawning the phrase “dead as a doornail.”
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