Freezing Balls

I received a little linguistic history in my mailbox yesterday that makes me feel whole lot more comfortable about using an expression sometimes spoken to declare unusually cold weather.

Back in the days when sailors were real men, ships were made of wood and Britania ruled the waves, engineers struggled with a rather serious problem.

To rule those waves, ships needed cannon, and a cannon is just an expensive ornament without cannon balls. There's not much point having cannon balls, thouigh, unless they're right next to the cannon that's destined to fire them. The problem is, they're balls, which, by their very nature, like to roll around under (or over) your feet.

So how do you store the balls next to the cannon safely and securely, especially when your deck isn't a stationary platform?

You put them in a box, right? Wrong! If you put them in a box, they're too difficult to get out. Remember, life or death could depend on the speed of reloading, and besides, anything wood might be damaged in battle, which would mean all you'd have to do to render your enemy's cannon inoperative would be to break the box holding the balls.

The best storage method was one you've seen in any swashbuckler... stack them in a square based pyramid... one on top, resting on four, resting on nine, resting on 16, stacking 30 cannon balls right next to the cannon. The problem with that, though, is that you need to stop the bottom layer from sliding out under the weight of the rest. First, they tried creating a wooden square on the deck but they quickly found that under the weight of the balls, the wood would eventually wear down, making the pyramid unstable. Wood also flexes, which is great if you want your ship to survive the first volley of shot, but really bad if you want something held in place by the wood to stay exactly where it is.

So the engineers struggled with ways to keep those pesky cannon balls on deck next to the cannon without them rolling around because as effective as these things were against your enemy's timber, if they went-a-rolling, they were even more effective against your ankle.

The solution was a heavy metal plate with 16 round indentations, called a "Monkey". In their simplest form, monkeys were the bashing bits at the end of pile drivers, and you could imagine that, with repeated bashing, the pile driver would develop a pile sized indentation in the metal.

Make a monkey with 16 indentations that exactly matched the configuration of the cannon balls and your problem was solved... almost. Unfortunately, if the monkey was made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it so engineers turned to the next available metal, brass.

Yes. It was called a "Brass Monkey".

Brass, though, has an interesting property. It expands and contracts with temperature much more than iron and an unfortunate consequence of that meant that if the temperature dropped too far, the plate would shrink to a point where the indentations would no longer line up with the cannon balls and your beautifully stacked pyramid would collapse.

It was, quite literally, cold enough to "freeze the balls off a brass monkey".

Like me, you probably thought the expression was some vulgar reference to testicles and brass ornaments. How quickly language forgets its roots.