05/30/2026
There are oft repeated phrases we hear, over and over again, but might not know the origins of. Here are a couple I learned about on a golf outing, with a couple of buddies, just yesterday. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries when disease outbreaks like cholera were fairly common, people who were thought to have died would sometimes “come back to life”. On occasion people who were seriously ill or in comas would be placed in caskets, only to “awaken” and make enough noise that an attendant or watchman, in the morgue or cemetery, would hear them and open the coffins and find them to still be alive. This occurred often enough that “Safety coffins” were created which included the practice of tying a string around a finger, of the victim, that was attached to a bell located outside of the coffin. The practice was commonly referred to with the phrases “dead ringer” and being “saved by the bell”. This makes total sense to me however, according to AI, some historians debate this, as linguistic evidence suggests these phrases actually originated in boxing and horse racing, respectively……personally, I like the coffin story better and plan to pass it along as being factual. Thankfully, with medical advances, this doesn’t happen much anymore. 😏
