A man who has been reading Anthony Cronin's Dead as Door- nails writes to ask where the phrase had its origin. Let me quote the great Steevens on the matter. He wrote, over a century ago now: "This proverbial expression is oftener used than understood. The door nail is the nail on which in ancient doors the knocker strikes. It is therefore used as a comparison to any one irrecoverably dead, one who has fallen (as Virgil says) multa morte, that is, with abundant death, such as iteration of strokes on the head would naturally produce." There you are, Mr Kelly.
From `Waterford Woman' comes a letter asking me about Black Monday. There was a fairly recent Black Monday, she vaguely remembers - something to do with a stock-market collapse, she thinks - but, she asks, wasn't there a calamity of some kind long ago which gave rise to the name?
Indeed there was. It was Easter Monday, April 14th, 1360, and it was called Black because of the severity of the day. The soldiers of Edward III, standing around Paris when they should have stood at home, froze to death. Shakespeare mentions it in The Merchant of Venice: "It was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last."
An interesting question from a Dublin lady who knows her Bible better than I do. She quotes Genesis and asks about the word sod in "And Jacob sod porridge". It's the past participle of seethe, of which it should more correctly be the preterite. Here it means boiled. Shakespeare talks of "twice-sod simplicity" in Love's Labour's Lost: he means twice boiled down, hence, concentrated. In Tudor times to sod had also come to mean to steep, to bathe. "Her eyes, though sod in tears, look'd red and raw" is from The Rape of Lucrece.
Far from the Bible were my thoughts as another sod came to what's left of my mind recently as I watched Tom Kilroy's play in the Abbey. That other sod, noun and verb, is, as all the world knows, from sodomy, but what brought a smile to my eyes was not the abbreviation, traced by Partridge to the British navy c.1818, but rather Swinburne's quatrain about poor, dear Oscar. It's rather good, don't you think?
When Oscar came to join his God,/Not earth to death, but sod to sod,/it was for sinners such as this/ Hell was created bottomless.