What exactly makes a majestically tall clock a “grandfather clock”? No, it has nothing to do with the only people who seem to have them these days (though it’s understandable why someone might think that).

Grandfather clocks are technically called “longcase clocks”, with their tall wooden cases, long swinging pendulums, ornate roman numerals, musically echoing chimes. They seem to belong in a world of courting parlors, model A Fords, and silent movies…basically, the world of our grandparents. But how they really got their geriatric nickname actually has nothing to do with grandparents.

When American songwriter named Henry Clay Work visited England back in 1875, he checked into the George Hotel in North Yorkshire. The hotel’s lobby had a large pendulum clock that no longer worked, and just sat in the lobby collecting dust. It piqued Work’s interest, so he asked the staff about the clock’s history. He was told that it had belonged to two, by then deceased, brothers who’d been the inn’s former owners. The clock had reportedly kept perfect time during the brothers’ lives, but when the first brother died, the clock stopped working. After having been repaired, however, the clock ultimately broke down & completely stopped working, allegedly, on the very day & at the very moment that the second brother died. And the clock stayed that way, even after multiple attempts to fix it.

Mr. Work loved that story, so he wrote a song about it entitled, “My Grandfather’s Clock.” And, while it may not have been Garth Brooks-caliber songwriting, the public went crazy over the song, ultimately selling over a million copies of the sheet music. From that point on, the public almost immediately stopped calling them “longcase clocks”, and instead began referring to the tall timepieces as “grandfather clocks”.

Fascinatingly, Henry Clay Work’s song lives on, having been recorded multiple times across the 20^th century, including by Johnny Cash in 1959 & even as recently as 2004 by R&B/Soul group Boyz II Men. Yet, while the song lives on, clock-lovers worry that old pendulum-swinging grandfather clocks may not be long for our modern, digital timekeeping world. But…for now, at least…just like the song, the grandfather clock keeps on ticking.

Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].

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Whenever you overhear co-workers gossiping about someone, or read some salacious story on social media, it’s always best to take that information “with a grain of salt”. But why do we say that? What does sodium have to do with retaining a prudent amount of skepticism?

The saying first showed up in ancient Rome around 77 CE, in Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History” regarding a passage about Pompey (the guy best known for fighting with Julius Caesar). In it, he’d found directions for a mixture to inoculate himself against particular poisons. The recipe’s author, Mithridates VI, was a guy who’d intentionally ingest small doses of poison as a way to build up his own immunity, and his recipe called for various different ingredients that were supposed to be minced together before ultimately adding a grain of salt.

It’s not really clear how the phrase arrived at the meaning it has today. Some people have erroneously interpreted the salty story as a figurative warning. As in, “It’s best to be skeptical when you’re not totally sure that you’re not going to accidentally poison yourself anyway”. But, with no other indication that any other Romans of the time used the “grain of salt” idiom, it’s more likely that salt was an actual part of genuine recipe. It’s also possible that using salt to make poison easier to swallow may have just seemed like an appropriate way to describe exercising a bit of caution in the face of questionable information.

“Grain of salt” popped up again in 1647 in John Trapp’s Commentary on the Old & New Testaments, but it didn’t really catch on until the early 1900s after the journal The Athenaeum mentioned it in a 1908 issue: “Our reasons for not accepting the author’s pictures of early Ireland without many grains of salt.” By that point, the phrase had most likely become common enough for most readers to get the gist of its meaning. But, considering the large grey areas in the history of this particular phrase, I wouldn’t necessarily consider all of this a comprehensive origin story. So, I guess it might be best to “take it with a grain of salt”.

Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].

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