"stiff upper lip" etymythology

[Jonathan Lighter]

Since those sailors buried at sea were customarily weighed down with roundshot sewed into their shrouds, you'd have to be a pretty stupid malingerer to play dead at sea.  And the ship's surgeon would have had to be a moron as well.  And everybody else involved.

JL

Geoffrey Nunberg <nunberg at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Geoffrey Nunberg
Subject: "stiff upper lip" etymythology
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According to a story in the Toronto Globe and Mail on "stiff upper lip":

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the phrase to 1815, when it
appeared in an edition of a Boston newspaper called Massachusetts Spy.

Another explanation that cleaves the expression firmly to Britain
says it originated in the Royal Navy. According to legend, dead
sailors being sewn into their shroud for burial at sea would have the
final stitch passed through the upper lip and nose.

This was apparently to ensure that the corpse was not actually
clinging to life. In theory, the pain would literally wake the dead.
And if it was a malingerer hoping to escape the hard life at sea, he
would have had to keep a very stiff upper lip to continue to pass for
dead

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050709/BLASTLIP09/TPInternational/Europe

Geoff Nunberg


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