Simile: like *substance* through a tin horn

[Victor Steinbok]

http://goo.gl/vaypI
Peace campaigns of a cornet. Volume 2. By North Ludlow Beamish. London:
1829 [?]
Chapter 8. March to Birmingham. pp. 194-5
> In order that the reader should equally participate in the joke, he
> must be informed that Breakpeace, who had no ear whatever for music,
> but, like Dr. Johnson, considered all noises equally sonorous, had an
> extraordinary fancy for that original instrument, called,
> paradoxically, a tin horn; with one of these he was known to amuse
> himself for half-an-hour at a time, and, in vain efforts to produce
> that startling octave on which a mail-coach guard so much prides
> himself, he sent forth the most hideous compound of high, low, and
> drowning tones that can be imagined. To acquire execution on the
> instrument was, however, his ambition; and as execution, he was told
> by the master of the band, was only to be acquired by practice, his
> efforts were carried on with untiring industry. The tin horn always
> occupied a conspicuous situation in his barrack-room, from whence its
> strains proceeded whenever the captain's leisure admitted of this
> delightful relaxation. So invaluable a resource was now, therefore,
> looked upon as vitally connected with, not only the captain's
> happiness, but that of the whole corps of bachelors; and the group in
> the barrack-yard heard, with much satisfaction,Breakpeace's expressed
> determination to continue his practice with unabating vigour.

http://goo.gl/w4X6U
St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks. Volume 16, Part 2
(34). Ed. by Mary Mapes Dodge. May 1889
p. 530/1
> As good as her word, she cut them out of canton flannel matching the
> hose, and slashed them medievally with blue and pink. They were a
> triumph. And Ethel converted the tin horn from the store into a
> knightly trumpet, by ends of waving ribbon and a flaring rim of
> repousse silver -- otherwise, tin-foil.
p. 744/1
> Unfortunately, every boat possessed a tin horn with which the helmsman
> was wont to warn of his approach the keeper of the draw-bridge. One
> evil-minded captain blew a blast of triumph, and in a minute's time
> the air was rent with tootings little less vicious than those of the
> steam whistle of a locomotive.

Even if this original use of tin horn was not behind the expression,
consider that Edison's original phonograph included a large tin horn for
reproducing the recorded sounds. Now imagine (or recall, if you're of
the right vintage) how the phonograph sounds compared to actual speech
or music.

Possibility #3--even earlier. The tin horn was the trademark of the
letter-carrier in late 17th and 18th century England (in broader terms,
not exclusive). This was so much so that, apparently, not only was the
approach of the letter-carrier was announced by the horrid sound, but
the tin horn was also embroidered on the badge of the letter-carrier.

http://goo.gl/FZ9oM
The Stamp-collector's magazine. 1868
Country Letter-Carrier. By Cuthbert Bede. pp. 146-8 [Google OCR text has
not been verified for errors]
> The country letter-carrier and village postman is always a noteworthy
> person in a rural community. ... Nowadays, when half-a-dozen
> deliveries per diem are deemed barely sufficient for the transaction
> of the domestic and mercantile needs and necessities of the mighty
> million "of the great Babel," it requires some mental exertion to
> endeavour to realise that former state of things in the United
> Kingdom, when the sending of a letter was as grave a business as the
> sending of an embassy; and when, till comparatively modern days, the
> country letter-carrier, with his tin horn, was a being as unknown as
> the unicorn, and equally as useless to society. But, while that
> heraldic quadruped still remains in the realms of myth and fiction,
> and only emerges from them to dance attendance on the royal arms, the
> country letter-carrier has become an established fact, and a necessity
> of our social existence.
> ...
> From 1660 such persons were to be appointed only by the
> Postmaster-General and his deputies; and they were not only to supply
> horses at halfan-hour's notice, but also to provide a guide with a
> horn to such as rode post.
>
> This horn was the customary badge of office of the country
> letter-carrier; and, when Cowper removed from Hnntingdon to
> Olney--still keeping to the banks of that river whose scenery he
> loved, and in whose "noble stream," as he called it, he loved, while
> at Huntingdon, to bathe three times a week--the approach of the
> letter-carrier, as he came over the long straggling bridge (the
> forerunner of the present structure) "that with iis wearisome but
> needful length" spanned the waters of the Ouse, widening to a "wintry
> flood," was heralded to the poet and the people of Olney by the sound
> of his " twanging horn." Indeed, the long tin horn was not the
> peculiar badge of the country letter-carrier, for it was also used by
> the town distributor of correspondence and news: and it will probably
> be within the personal recollection of many of my readers, that the
> delivery of letters in London and other large cities, was accompanied
> by a hideous fanfaronade of tin horns, each postman performing a wild
> solo, with a power equal to the "blast of that dread horn" borne on
> those Fontarabian echoes that came to the ears of King Charles. The
> arrival of the mail-coach was announced by a similar tin-horn solo,
> except in those cases where the red-coated guard was a sufficient
> musician to play upon the key-bugle. Such a musician was the "Charley
> James" of my younger days, the celebrated guard of that most
> celebrated coach, the "Hirondelle" (the word was always pronounced as
> spelt), which, with the "Hibernia," conveyed the mails from Worcester
> to Shrewsbury. On May-day they raced, to see which coach could
> accomplish the journey in the briefest time; the coaches were gay with
> May-boughs, the horses with ribbons and resplendent harness, and the
> guards with new redcoats, and Charley James " qui scarletum coatum
> habebat," as the comic Latin grammar says, played spirit-stirring
> melodies on the silver key-bugle, which had been presented to him by
> admirers of his musical talent. But that was an exceptional case, and
> the common tin-horn was the normal instrument and badge of office of
> the mail-guards and letter-carriers.
> ...
> At length these tin-horns became a nuisance so intolerable, that, in
> the early part of the reign of George IV., they were forbidden by law
> to be used in the London streets. A fine of ten shillings was to be
> the penalty for a first conviction of the offender, and twenty
> shillings for a second conviction. Thus in towns the tin-horn was put
> down, together with muffin-bells, dustmen's-bells, and other similar
> disagreeables, although the two last-named are still permitted at
> London-Super-Mare, much to the annoyance of Brighton visitors,
> especially those who are invalids, and have been recommended to
> lodgings in a quiet street, where, as is always the case with " quiet
> streets," the fish-sellers, the nigger vocalists, the acrobats, the
> Punch shows, the stray musicians, and the other flotsam and jetsam of
> a fashionable seaside town, most do congregate, making the street as
> "full of noises " as Prospero's island, and giving the modern Hogarth
> a subject for a companion picture to his "Enraged Musician."
>
> The urban letter-carrier has vanished, together with his tin-horn; and
> the town postman has changed to a smart-liveried person, whose sharp
> rat-tat and hurried walk are heard several times in the course of the
> day. "Every day, as sure as the clock, somebody hears the postman's
> knock," is the not very recondite remark of a song, whose popularity
> is due to the liveliness of the air to which it has been wedded ;
> which air, by the way, strongly recalls the melody of " The Witches
> Dance," in Locke's music te "Macbeth." But, though "somebody hears the
> postman's knock," it is highly satisfactory to the inhabitants of "the
> great Babel" that nobody hears the postman's horn. Yet, as fashions
> survive in the country long after they have gone out of date in town,
> so the postman's horn is still to be heard "twanging," as it did
> eighty years ago at Olney. In rural districts, the lettercarriers, as
> they plod their round from village to village, still, in numerous
> instances, continue to herald their approach with that "heart-shaking
> music" in which they indulged in Cowper's day. Here, for example, in
> Minima Parva, I hear the sound of such a twanging horn from such a
> country letter-carrier nearly every day in the year; and experienced
> ears will detect its peculiar twang from the like tin-horn performance
> of the rag and bone collector, as he also makes his rounds from
> cottage to cottage, and announces his coming with horn-blowing.
> Indeed, those lines of Cowper's--the seven first in the fourth book of
> "The Task "-- would still aptly describe the country lettercarrier of
> the present day, as he may be found in many rural districts. And dear
> to artists is the country letter-carrier! Painters of the English
> genre class delight in him; and very rarely is there an exhibition of
> modern paintings without a picture of the country letter-carrier
> depicted under some one of the many varieties that he presents. And it
> may not be out of place to say that those seven lines from "The Task,"
> descriptive of the Olney postman, appeared in the catalogue of "The
> Exhibition of Drawings and Sketches by Amateur Artists," in the year
> 1853, appended to drawing No. 394, the amateur artist of which was the
> present writer, who had long loved the poet of Olney and all his
> works, and who, in that drawing, endeavoured to realise his idea of
> Cowper's country letter-carrier.

In addition to mangling the sounds, the letter carrier may well have
been accused of another atrocity--mangling the contents of packages that
they delivered. I f we make several possibly unwarranted
assumptions--that the mail itself had been associated with the tin horn
of the postman; that, as such, the mangled content was also associated
with the tin horn; and, the idea of carriers doing to the content what
the tin horn did to the sounds had spawned the expression--we may arrive
at the possibility that the expression itself is in no way mangled and
has a long history. For my part, I am not prepared to make such a
declaration, but I am certainly willing to put it out as a potential
explanation.

     VS-)

On 4/4/2012 2:06 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> FWIW I lean in the opposite direction. My impression is that the tin
> horn was a poorly made, cheap imitation of a brass horn or a trumpet,
> of sorts. The expression "through a tin horn" suggests playing sounds
> intended for the real thing on a tin horn instead and getting just
> noise. That's the idea--the rough equivalent of this might be "turns
> everything to shit". So, "X through a tin horn", to me, suggests not a
> simile by a mixed metaphor. Of course, unlike some list members, I was
> not around in the 1860s, so it's all just supposition.
>
> VS-)

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