Stop teetering guiltily in public when you hear the term “cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey.” It doesn’t refer to what you think it does. Here’s a bit of American trivia for a ho-hum Friday:
In the days when sailing ships ruled the ocean, freighters and war ships were armed with cannons. Problem was, how to keep a good supply of round cannon balls from rolling around the moving ship’s deck and keep them in a small spot near the canon?
Someone came up with a stacking pattern: 16 balls on the bottom, with 9 on top of them, then one on the top. It worked–except that the bottom row kept wanting to slide out from under the upper rows. So they added an iron plate, called a “Monkey,” to that lower row.
Then there was the problem of rust, which iron loves to do. Obviously, the answer was to make the plate out of brass rather than iron. Thus, the term “brass monkey.”
Here comes another problem: when it’s cold, brass contracts a lot more than iron, often so much that the cannon balls would fall right out of the plates’ indentations and roll right out.
And that’s how we ended up with “cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey.”
Winter is coming. Maybe you’ll be able to use this expression soon in polite company.