Sufu is dead

[skiniks]

This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.

But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Could it be because of the repetition of sounds, and the much better rhythm of the phrase

Dead enough for you?

compared with the version without door? Almost certainly the euphony has caused the phrase to survive longer than the alternatives I’ve quoted. But could there something special about a doornail?

The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.

But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know.

[Guest jmatsu]

i thought it was "dead as a doornail"

what is a "doornail?"

seriously.

yeah i think i heard that 2. comparing sufu with krak-ho more appropriate.

sometimes krak-hos b good. sometimes they just lie there. sometimes they crazy. sometimes they b funny. other times they just pretty boring. they usually just od and eventually die, but sometimes...just sometimes they get to rehab.

[denimdestroyedmylife]

icannotreadethallthat.gif

[julzkind]

I'd like to creepily volunteer to be your Samwise.

i was too shy to ask someone to be my samwise.

the position is yours...

[16steps]

supertrash is officially dead when jmatsu's attention is focused on outdated american colloquialisms

dead as a doornail is a Shakespeare reference

[artificialsky]

[16steps]

i think that single line uttered by Kodiak is the reason my POS sweater isnt selling

that and the link is outddated

[Thorns]

i was too shy to ask someone to be my samwise.

the position is yours...

Sweet! My ol gaffer will be so proud.

[e0d9n0b5]

i think that single line uttered by Kodiak is the reason my POS sweater isnt selling

that and the link is outddated

kodiak is responsible for killing sufu in general.

[WayneGibbous]

kodiak is responsible for killing sufu in general.

truth (10ch)

[Kodiak]

;):confused::eek:

[Francis Xavier]

qmYQsSES-zQ

Lame shit ends now.

[travisio]

how can sufu be dead

if jawnz if 4eva

(wu tang concept)

[homi29]

dis shit be like dead like PDAs

[RyanF]

my posts keep disappearing

[billy.]

i don't know where to go.

i can't move up to sz.

i dont wanna go down to hb.

i'm stuck here in dotted purgatory.

[the_state]

i don't know where to go.

i can't move up to sz.

i dont wanna go down to hb.

i'm stuck here in dotted purgatory.

i was just gonna type the same thing man. i was about to join SZ based on format alone but i'm too grimey for that shit.

[Akira]

Lame shit ends now.

You jus mad cause you didn't get a shout out

[Akira]

i don't know where to go.

i can't move up to sz.

i dont wanna go down to hb.

i'm stuck here in dotted purgatory.

why not go to the other sf?

[16steps]

why not go to the other sf?

thats where i is

[samsikle]

this sucks. when i come home i expect to read a ridiculous amount of hilarious posts, but no. superfuture is now a ghost town, with tumbleweed rolling across my screen. and everyone is disappearing since this shit keeps deleting posts!!

[16steps]

tell me about it.....no one posts anymore....no waywt pics, no recent purchases....no general banter between members

shits fuckin dead

[poopie boy]

this place is wack. i only post here because i don't have shit to do anymore because sufu has turned so wack it has depressed me into not wanting to do anything else anymore. so i use all this time to post on sufu now.

[samsikle]

double post

[kunk75]

styleforum. we're all there now

i don't know where to go.

i can't move up to sz.

i dont wanna go down to hb.

i'm stuck here in dotted purgatory.

[tac0tron]

No way, i'm not going to take that extra step and register for styleforum... come back Sufu... do you need voodoo majick?

[Wesley Pipes]

so sad:(

[denimdestroyedmylife]

i like the fucked up superfuture

it feels more intimate

the more fucked up the interface, the dearer to my heart

[Begåvningsreserven]

sufu is like Yoko Ono. You like her, we dont.

[denimdestroyedmylife]

do you have a file on me?!!!