And welcome to another installment of the origins of common English phrases. In this posting, we have…

Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls off a Brass Monkey

Meaning: REALLY REALLY REALLY COLD!!

Before you start, this has nothing to do with primate testicles.

A ‘brass monkey’ was the nickname given to the rack or stand which held cannonballs on old wooden battleships. Brass was chosen because it doesn’t rust in the salty air of the ocean. But in cold weather, the brass would freeze and shrink at a faster rate than the iron cannonballs. This meant that the cannonballs would become unstable in cold weather and roll off the rapidly shrinking ‘monkey’, scattering and rolling all over the deck. As this would only happen in extremely cold temperatures, when it was ‘cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey’, it had to be exceptionally nippy outside.

Sleep Tight!

Meaning: Sleep Comfortably.

We’ve all had our parents say this to us at least once, right?

“Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed-bugs bite!”

Thanks to the news-stories being flashed across our television screens in this increasingly health-conscious world that we inhabit, we’re all rather aware of what bed-bugs are. Little blood-sucking bastards which crawl around in dirty linen.

But what exactly is the ‘sleep tight’ thing?

“Sleep Tight” refers to the earliest forms of beds.

Back when going to bed literally meant having to make your own bed, ‘sleeping tight’ meant just that. Sleeping nice and tight, a necessity, any chiropractor will tell you, for keeping perfect spinal alignment.

On early beds, the wooden frame had holes drilled into it. Through these holes, ropes were weaved back and forth lengthwise and widthwise across the empty middle of the bedframe. Such weaving was usually done by a man called a webber or a webster. If your name’s ‘Webber’ or ‘Webster’ and you ever wondered where it came from, it’s from this type of weaving, or ‘webbing’, which was strung across bedframes.

To prevent the mattress falling through the rope webbing, or netting strung out between the bedframe, it was necessary, every now and then, to pull in the slack of the ropes so that the mattress wouldn’t sag down during the night. Thus, you were quite literally “sleeping tight”, with firm, tightly-stretched webbing for a better night’s sleep.

Good night!

“In the Limelight”

Meaning: To be the center of attention.

Some people love being in the limelight. Others hate it. But what does light have to do with citrus fruits?

…nothing at all.

The ‘lime’ mentioned in ‘limelight’ comes from a compound called calcium oxide, more commonly known as ‘quicklime’, a sort of chalky, white substance.

In the Regency period, major public buildings such as theaters could be effectively lit at night for the first time. The laying of the first gas-mains, with gas-jets and nozzles allowed large public institutions to be lit brightly at night for the first time in history. No longer did people have to rely on candles and oil-lamps to light the way. While gaslight was a vast improvement over candlelight (especially once they’d worked out the kinks), there was still one big issue…Gaslight is stationary.

You have a wall-bracket, or a chandelier of gas-jets, which you would light and then cover with a glass shield. And…that was it. It was bright, but it wasn’t that bright, and it couldn’t be moved around like an oil-lamp or candles. Theaters with performances taking place at night were lit by footlights on the stage (gas or oil-fired) and by gas or oil-lamps hanging from the ceiling. But the light was not nearly powerful enough to make it effective.

Enter…Limelight!

It was discovered in the 1820s that you could light oxygen and hydrogen and create a powerful flame.

…Yeah.

But people already knew about gases and stuff like that. So what’s the big deal?

Nothing. But then they realised that this very powerful flame, if played over a lump of quicklime, suddenly became blindingly bright. It was discovered that by shifting the position of the flame, or by adjusting it’s size via the amounts of oxygen or hydrogen that were fed to it, the light produced from the flame burning up the quicklime could be vastly intensified or reduced. For the brightest possible light, the hottest part of the flame had to be concentrated on the lump of quicklime.

Realising the potential uses for this, theaters were quick to jump at the chance to use this new type of lighting. Using mirrors and lenses to focus and direct the beam, for the first time in history it was possible for theaters to have powerful and directional lights. Limelights were the grandparents of the huge spotlights that we’re familiar with today. The first theater limelights were fired up in 1837. Their use continued for decades, before finally losing ground to the much more powerful electric lights that were becoming cheaper and more plentiful by the 1880s and 1890s.

For all its power and brightness and fantastic illumination, limelighting was not without its dangers. It wasn’t uncommon for the balloons of oxygen or (especially) hydrogen to be punctured and leak or explode. In especially bad accidents, the entire theater could burn down!

Although we now use electric spotlamps, the old phrase of being “in the limelight” still exists today.

“Wet Blanket”

Meaning: To be a downer. A pessimist. A killjoy.

The term ‘wet blanket’ came around in the 1800s. Like “limelight”, it too was taken from the world of the theater. As early theaters were lit by gas, candles, oil or limelight, the risk of fire was constant. All it took was one careless person, one tipped lamp, or one misadjustment of the limelighter’s gas-levers to cause an explosion or fire in the middle of the performance. To minimise the risk of fire, literal wet blankets were kept in buckets of water on the stage. This way, if the heat from the oil or gas-fired footlights, common to many theaters of the time, did start a fire, a cheap and effective fire-extinguisher was near at hand to prevent a complete disaster. In time, the act of throwing a wet blanket on a fire to put it out became synonymous with someone ‘putting out’ the fun a situation and becoming a buzz-kill.