It's nice to see the "Bad Old Days" hoax appearing on this board. It makes for entertaining reading, but very little of it is true. It's a well-known Internet/e-mail hoax message. Here are some comments on this stuff.
If you want an authoritative debunking, I'll forward the message to our senior partner's wife, Reatha Warnicke, who teaches medieval English history at Arizona State University and who has published multiple books on the subject. You know...just your basic Harvard Ph.D. sort of person.
Bullsh**
The word "sh**" has long been the subject of various apocryphal stories tracing it's meaning to various acronyms. Other suggestions for its origin are a disparaging term used by officers who did not attend West Point and described that school as the South Hampton Institute of Technology. All of those explanations, including the "Ship High In Transit" story, are fiction.
Etymologists discovered that the word "sh**" appeared in its earliest form circa 1,000 A.D. in the Old English verb
scitan. It derives from an Indo-European root
skei-, meaning to cut or to split. For most of its history, "sh**" was spelled as "shi*e", and the present spelling first surfaced in texts in the mid-1700's.
And before people start on fu**, that word is not an acronym (e.g. "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", "Fornication Under the Crown of the King"), either. That word crept into the English language around the 15th century from Low German or Dutch.
Tomato Poisoning
I'm also going to call bullshi** on the tomato and pewter fact. Tomatoes are native to South and Central America (there are European varieties, but they are small and yellowish). Cortez discovered them growing in Cortez' garden in 1519 and brought them back to Europe. The tomato is a member of the deadly nightshade family and was erroneously thought to be poisonous because of its relation to the poisonous nightshade. Indeed, Tournefort, the French botanist who gave the tomato it's Latin botanical name
Lycopersicon esculentum (translated, "wolf peach") named it such because it was believed to be poisonous. Tournefort mistook the tomato for the "wolfpeach" mentioned by Galen in his third century writings, i.e. a poison in a palatable package used to destroy wolves.
Interestingly, until the end of the 18th century, physicians warned against eating tomatos because they were believed to cause appendicitis and stomach cancer.
Europeans considered the tomato to be ornamental. In 1820 in Salem, New Jersey, Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, who had learned of the tomato in 1808 during his travels abroad, ate a tomato on the steps of the Salem courthouse, conclusively proving that tomatoes were not poisonous. By 1842, the tomato was the "latest craze" in the culinary world, and anyone who did not perceive them as such was considered an object of pity.
The tomato plant's roots and leaves contain the neurotoxin solanine, and thus are indeed poisonous. It is also true that lead can leach out of pewter, but lead poisoning is slow and gradual process, and would not have been associated with one particular food.
Trench Mouth
Trench mouth is a painful form of gingivitis. The term "trench mouth" derives from World War I when the disorder was common among soldiers. The mouth normally contains a balance of different microorganisms. Trench mouth occurs when there is an overabundance of normal mouth bacteria resulting in infection and inflammation of the gums, which develop painful ulcers. Viruses may be involved in allowing the bacteria to overgrow.
Graveyard Shift, Dead Ringers and Saved by the Bell
The "facts" posted about these terms come from a well-known Internet/e-mail hoax. Here's the response copied from the hoax debunkers:
England was not so "old and small" that new cemeteries could not be established, but crowded graveyards did exist, due to the Christian tradition of burying the dead in the consecrated grounds of Church yards. Some towns managed to arrange for cemeteries outside the municipal boundaries, but Church property was not subjected to secular law and the practice continued throughout the Middle Ages.
It wasn't until the 18th century that the nefarious practice of removing the bones from a grave to make room for new coffins took place. Church sextons would quietly dispose of the bones in nearby pits. There were no "bone-houses" and the coffins were usually so decayed that if scratch-marks had ever been made inside them they would not be distinguishable in the rotted wood. The gravediggers would often appropriate the hardware (handles, plates, and nails) of decayed coffins to sell for waste metal.1 The matter was resolved in the mid-nineteenth century when London succeeded in passing a law that closed the churchyards and put heavy restrictions on burial within the city limits, and most cities and towns across Great Britain soon followed its lead.
At no time during the Middle Ages was there a prevalent fear that people were getting buried alive, and in no known instance did anyone rig up a bell-pull to notify the living. Most medieval people were smart enough to distinguish a living person from a dead one. Throughout history there has been the occasional case of someone getting buried alive, but by no means was this as frequent as the hoax would have you believe.
The common phrases used in the last portion of the hoax have absolutely nothing to do with premature burial, and each has its origin in a different source.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the phrase "graveyard shift" dates to the early 20th century. It may have its source in the night shift on nautical vessels, which was called "graveyard watch" for its quiet loneliness.
"Saved by the bell" originates from the sport of boxing, in which a fighter is "saved" from further punishment or from a ten-count when the bell signifies that the round is over. (But the next round is another story.)
A "ringer" is slang for an imposter. It was used in cheating at horse races, when an unscrupulous trainer would substitute a fast horse, or ringer, for a nag with a bad racing record. This sporting association continues in the modern use of the term "ringer" for a professional athlete playing in an amateur game. But a human can also be a ringer in the sense of a person who closely resembles someone else, like the professional entertainers who impersonate celebrities such as Dolly Parton and Cher.
A "dead ringer" is simply someone who is extremely close in appearance to another, in the same way as someone who is "dead wrong" is as wrong as he can possibly can be.
There's lots more, but I think you get the picture. Just do a search on the "bad old days" hoax, and you'll find lots of debunkers.
