The Steel Guitar Forum

..neat site that I stumbled upon, has the lyrics and melodies to dozens and dozens of sea chantys, even has a glossary of nautical terms...

..do you know where the saying "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" comes from?..I'll bet the answer will surprise you..just click the link below to find out...

http://www.acronet.net/~robokopp/shanty.html

Pat, and I have not gone to the sight yet,
brass monkey refers to a piece of ondeck hardware on the old sailing vessels that
held the stacks of cannonballs. In rough seas
they were prone to giving up the stack.
BTW....
"The Whole Nine Yards" comes from 2 places:
one is nautical: On the large 3-masted ships
when the captain gave the order it meant to lower the 3 largest lower sails, one on each mast, and that the 9 yards had to do with the size of those sails.

The other place is from the air force/navy.
Pilots in the Pacific in WWII would often refer to their combat forays as "I gave em
the whole nine yards"...and what they meant was that, in most of the attack fighters, the ammo belt that fed the machine guns were 27 feet long, or 9 yards, and if you emptied the
magazine, you just shot off the 'whole nine yards'.
FWIW
Chip

That is a neat site - I learned a lot! Thanks, Pat.

------------------
I don't drink or lie, but I swear I steel!!

Well, Chip, here's the origin of "Freeze the balls off a brass monkey" according to the site..

<SMALL>Freezing the Balls off a Brass Monkey - A brass monkey is a brass triangle which is put on the ground and used to keep cannonballs in a neat pile or pyramid beside a gun. When the weather gets very cold the brass triangle contracts more than the iron and causes the cannonballs to roll off, hence the saying.</SMALL>

..I just love sites like this..I've got one book marked at home for Civil War songs, I'll post it tonight..

..I love to sing, I even liked singing cadence in the Army, these Chanty's were the same thing, only much better than what we have today..

Pat, yeah...I was in the ballpark...forgot
that brass would contract quicker than the iron cannonballs. I often go to a lot of sea
and nautical websites.....I get off on where these terms come from; and true, many of them come from the old sailing days.

Robert McNeil [of Lerher & McNeil TV magazine show] wrote a great books on WORDS...I forget the title now...and I do have the book somewhere...but he grew up in Nova Scotia
during WWII and his father was in the Canadian Navy, and so he came to know a lot of the seafaring terms and language and wrote about in this book where a lot of it came from. I'll try to find the book [already spent about 1/2 hour searching].

Chips Ahoy