Small boys at hangings

[lynbrown]

What is the expression derived from small boys who used to pull on a hanging mans feet, to ensure he dies quickly?

[Grunty]

Are you pulling my leg?

Actually I do not believe that was the origin of the saying, but some people do.

[Quizmonster]

Click here for a website which outlines the potential sources of "pull someone's leg"...if that is the one you are looking for. It's clear that no-one knows its origin, so Grunty is perfectly right to be sceptical of the 'hanging' source.

[saxy_jag]

They weren't necessarily small boys, but they were known as hangers on. They were paid by the person being hanged, so obviously, if the person was poor, they'd have fewer 'hangers on'.

[Thunderbird+]

Ankle swingers

[Quizmonster]

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'hanger-on' has never meant anything - even as long ago as the 1500s - than exactly what we mean by the word now. I suspect, therefore, that Saxy_Jag's response is a bit of etymythology rather than etymology!

[saxy_jag]

I've actually read about this phrase in several museums/gaols around the country that deal with the history of the British justice system. If it is a myth, then thousands of people must believe it.

This is a fairly recent publication that also mentions it:

http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Phrases-and-Say ings/Question321996.html#top

Etymology doesn't come into it. It's more about common usage of the phrase than about how the words were formed and developed.

[Quizmonster]

Quite, Saxy_Jag, but then thousands of people believe that "freeze the balls off a brass monkey" has to do with cannon-balls on old warships or that a "square meal" comes from the idea that sailors used to get their food served on square wooden trays or that "posh" is from an acronym of 'Port out starboard home'. And these are just a few supposedly related to our maritime history. None of these is the case either.

Your claim that (quote) "etymology doesn't come into it" is, frankly, quite incomprehensible to me, given that we are discussing what the word 'hanger-on' actually means or may ever have meant!

[saxy_jag]

I thought etymology was to do with the formation of the word linguistically, and not its usage.

The linguistic (and presumably etymological) origin of the word 'stink' for instance is nothing to do with what I mean when I react to someone's bad experience with 'that really stinks!"

If the 'hangers on' explanation is a myth, then could you tell us please, what it really refers to? Only I've seen records at Lincoln Castle to the effect that such people did actually exist.

As for brass monkeys, it's a term I've never looked into, but you should know a great many of your naval 'myths' (including POSH) aren't. Jeez, you'll be telling me next there was never a Xmas day football match on the western front.

[Quizmonster]

The Oxford English Dictionary (TOED) defines 'etymology' as (quote): "the process of tracing out and describing the elements of a word with their modifications of form and sense."
Here we have the basic word 'hang'...around for the past 1000 years...with the suffix modification 'er' changing the meaning to something dangling...since the 1400s...with the hyphenated '-on'...since the 1500s.
All of these elements/modifications - root, suffix, hyphenation - are parts of the etymology of the word 'hanger-on'.
As to its meaning, I was a tad over-enthusiastic when I said it had never meant anything else other than what we now use it to mean...for which I apologise.
The original and current meaning...which is what I was getting at...are the same. I'm sure we can both agree on what that is, but apart from that it has over the centuries meant two other things. Firstly, an adjunct or appendage, for example an additional phrase in a document and, secondly, a worker who loaded tubs of coal into the cage in a mine-shaft.
TOED has no record of its ever having meant someone clinging to a condemned person's legs on the gallows. Given that a key task the lexicographers at Oxford have had over the many decades of the dictionary's development has been finding all of a word's usages, it is - if it were true - quite startling that they have never found any such reference.

Re 'posh' and 'square meal', post a question of your own and I'll provide the evidence that neither has anything whatever to do with ships. I don't want to take up any more of Lyn's thread here. (My apologies, Lyn, for space already hijacked!)

[saxy_jag]

Toed? Not sure where you got that from.

The 'boys' were known as 'hangers-on' or sometimes 'leg-pullers' (which terms, by the way, I have hyphenated) because that's exactly what they were. Obviously both terms have had other meanings over the years and probably before the earliest judicial hangings. But the original question didn't ask for the origin - just what they were known as.

I don't need to post any questions about seafaring parlance because it's not something that I desperately need to know about at the current time.

And yes, Lyn, sorry to hijack your thread. I shall bow out now.

[saintpeter48]

also the term money for old rope comes from the hanging days, they used to cut up the rope used at the gallows and sell it to the crowd, strange but true.

[Quizmonster]

Again, an alternative origin has been suggested for the phrase 'money for old rope'. This time, it is that - when sailing-ships returned from long voyages - the rigging-ropes would often be replaced with new ones in preparation for the next trip. It was a bit of a perk for the bosun to sell the old lines which were still perfectly usable in ordinary circumstances though not for the stresses and strains of sailing. As a result, it is claimed, he was getting 'money for old rope'.

Despite the apparent age of sayings about sailing-ships and public hangings, there is no written record of the phrase 'money for old rope' before the 1930s! (In other words, it's only about as old as I am!)
Again...it forces one to wonder whether the supposed origins of these things have any truth in them at all.
I have no doubt but that hangmen's and sailing-ships' ropes were sold but it would seem that no-one used the phrase at the time and it became somehow "attached" to these activities only long, long afterwards as a pseudo-explanation.