melissa2

I found this all interesting and stuff. But then again I am a big nerd.

So in the 1500s in England, there was apparently a scarcity of burial space. So when a person died, an existing grave was raided for use of its coffin. But these gravedigging guys began noticing that about 1 in 25 coffins had scratch marks inside them; people were being buried alive. To amend this, they began attaching a string to the finger of the "deceased" to a bell above the ground to ring if they actually were not dead. A person was assigned to listen for the bell. This is where the term "graveyard shift" came from. And the person who rang the bell was thus "saved by the bell" and then became known as a "dead ringer."

Origins of phrases are fun.........