Use
Early references to "brass monkeys" in the 19th century have no references to balls at all, but instead variously say that it is cold enough to freeze the tail, nose, ears, and whiskers off a brass monkey; or hot enough to "scald the throat" or "singe the hair" of a brass monkey. All of these variations imply that an actual monkey is the subject of the metaphor.
- The first known recorded use of the phrase "brass monkey" appears in the humorous essay "On Enjoying Life" by Eldridge Gerry Paige (writing under the pseudonym "Dow, Jr."), published in the New York Sunday Mercury and republished in the book Short Patent Sermons by Dow, Jr. (New York, 1845):
:When you love, your heart, hands, feet and flesh are as cold and senseless as the toes of a brass monkey in winter.
- The second known published instance of the phrase appeared in 1847, in a portion of Herman Melville's autobiographical narrative Omoo:
- "It was so excessively hot in this still, brooding valley, shut out from the Trades, and only open toward the leeward side of the island, that labor in the sun was out of the question. To use a hyperbolical phrase of Shorty's, 'It was 'ot enough to melt the nose h'off a brass monkey.'"
- The first recorded use of freezing a "brass monkey" dates from 1857, appearing in C.A. Abbey, Before the Mast, p. 108: "It would freeze the tail off a brass monkey".
Michael Quinion's World Wide Words website says:
"it was first recorded in the USA, in the 1850s...in the oldest example known, from Herman Melville’s Omoo (1850)"
- The Story of Waitstill Baxter, by Kate Douglas Wiggin (1913) has "The little feller, now, is smart's a whip, an' could talk the tail off a brass monkey".
- The Ivory Trail, by Talbot Mundy (1919) has "He has the gall of a brass monkey".
- Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) wrote in one of his notebooks:
- Ernest said, "It would freeze the balls off a brass monkey — that's how cold it gets."
Currently, 3rd Platoon of C Company, 1/503 IN (ABN) of the 173rd ABCT refer to themselves as the Brass Monkeys.
A racehorse named "Brass Monkey" is buried in the infield of Rockingham Park in Salem, New Hampshire.
Read more about this topic: Brass Monkey (colloquial Expression)
Famous quotes containing the word use:
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)