a stiff drink, to be shit faced drunk, and the graveyard shift

You must be thinking "what an interesting, albeit slightly inappropriate, title for a blog post, Debby. I wonder what this is about." Don't worry baby birds, I'll feed you.
This post is dedicated to three of the most interesting word origins I learned about on the trip to London and Edinburgh. The first happened in London while in Trafalgar Square, the place where people in London gather whenever anything important happens. This is also the square that at one point had 35,000 pigeons so now the birds are fed contraceptives in their feed...
Our tour guide, Coops, took us to the square and told us about Admiral Nelson, a fierce man who lost an arm and an eye in battle and lead the British fleet to many victories. During one such victory, he was fatally wounded and didn't make it through the fight. Being that he was a war hero, and not a common sailor, he was not given a burial at sea but taken back to England for a war hero's reception and burial. To preserve the body during the weeks of the homeward voyage, the body was folded in half and shoved into a barrel, then the barrel was filled with brandy. Strange, but effective. When they arrived at port and opened the barrel, it was found that the brandy was gone! The people were dumbfounded; how could a corpse drink all the brandy? Or maybe he absorbed it all... they were stumped until they took the body out and noticed the holes in the barrel. Sailors had been drilling small holes in the barrel and drinking the brandy, perhaps after a rough day on the boat, the entire time. So the origin of a drink to help people unwind after work, a stiff drink, comes from the stiff lifeless body that the brandy was preserving... disgusting, yet hilarious.

Secondly, we learned many things in Edinburgh about the dead and Scotland's awkward relationship with them. Edinburgh is a small place and for a while it was walled in, so land was precious. When the graveyard filled up with people buried at 6 feet deep, the were buried at 4. When that filled up, they were covered in a shroud and buried at 2 feet deep. When it rained, which it tends to do in Scotland, the top soil would wash away and so would some bones... Years later, when space needed to be made for other things, such as parking lots, the graveyards were relocated. Upon doing this, many coffins were opened and approximately 20% of these had scratch marks on the inside of the coffin... 1/5 of the people in the graveyard were buried alive because of poor medical science and the ability to tell if someone was unconscious or really dead. After this was discovered, for a while they tied strings attached to bells outside the graves to the person's fingers so if they woke up, they could be unearthed. Crazy... Now, once people were buried, it wasn't the end of things. Once you were dead, your body belonged to no one. As long as it was stripped of any possessions, it wasn't stealing, so body snatchers would dig up fresh graves (less than 2 weeks old) and sell the bodies to medical universities for a considerable amount of money. The first serial killers we learned of made a killing (pun intended) doing this. They would get people drunk, bring them back to their place, and then suffocate them in a way that it wasn't detectable that there was foul play. They were eventually caught when they did this during the day and left the body in a pile of kindling to come back for at night and it was discovered by someone. They killed between 17 and 35 people this way (large range since they couldn't detect foul play...). In order to protect your family and friends once they died, people would sit on their graves during the night for the first two weeks; this was called the graveyard shift.
Another great story we heard about grave robbing was about a woman who passed away, was buried, dug up the same night by some grave robbers, and they were intending to sell her body. Now, as I mentioned, the body couldn't have anything on it, or it was considered stealing and the fine was much higher than for just selling a body. Mary's, this woman, fingers were covered in rings and the fingers had swollen so much, that the robbers couldn't get them off no matter what they tried, be it spit, oil, brute force. Eventually, one realized that they didn't need extremities at the medical college and started to cut her fingers off one by one. He cut through one, took the ring off, and threw away the finger. Cut through the next one, no problem. Started to cut the third finger, and Mary woke up screaming at the top of her lungs. Apparently she was just in a coma and the agonizing pain of having her fingers sawed off one by one woke her from it. Wouldn't that be a fantastic wake up? Not so much...

The last word origin we learned in Edinburgh was what it means to be shit faced drunk. The buildings in Edinburgh are built very closely together and many of them are over 5 or 6 stories tall, this left for small alleyways between the buildings, some of which never saw daylight at the bottom. In these alleys, people would yell out the window and then dump their bed chamber pots out; the remains would then be washed to the lake with the next rainfall. To avoid dumping these on people constantly, it was mandated that pots be emptied twice a day, at 7 am and 10 PM. Around the corner from these alleys were the bars where men would gather after work to drink. In these days, wine and beer were more safe to consume than water, which was extremely contaminated (wonder why... waste running into the main source, perhaps?) so men would drink lots of it. At ten pm, when bars closed, they would walk home through these dark alleys and when they heard shouts from above them, they would look up... and get covered in shit because they were too drunk to get out of the way or avoid the alley at that time. Hilarious :) I never knew this phrase had an origin, but I love it.

Hope you all enjoyed this post as much as I did :)
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