It was my dad. He's full of colloquialisms.
My son would tell you my favorite was either "Improvise, adapt, & overcome" or "Better to have it & not need it than to need it and not have it".
Crush, kill, mangle, maim, destroy.
Lol...You stupidIt has to do with the Doorknob Apocalypse of 1902.
There was actually a tv show that addressed thisyeah, the phrase is deader than a door nail
I actually spent alot of time compiling a list of old phrases several years ago
many of them came from nauitcal backgrounds and alot of them from the King James Bible of 1611
Because life has a habit of throwing nasty surprise to even the most prepared.But if you live by the second how will you ever get to practice the first?
Not sure WHO amended the original; but "Deader than a doorNAIL" seems to have some basis in carpentry:
[The phrase] could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know.
From...._
English Language & Usage Stack Exchange