The 30 men present carried a 'huge keg of rum' around the town and then drank toasts with 'full bumpers' to:ġst: The 4th of July, 1776, the birthday of our ninepence. The newspaper included a letter that reported on a celebration of the 4th of July, in the town of Stratford. Such grouping together of 'stock' and 'lock' and 'barrel' does lay the groundwork for their adoption as a single unit, that is, a phrase an example of that is found in the USA in July 1803 in The Connecticut Sentinel. she found my Highland Pistols, which were a Piece of curious Workmanship, the Stock, Lock and Barrel being of polish'd Steel.Ĭalling that usage a phrase is stretching reality thin it is more a form of words and certainly not a metaphorical reference to 'the whole thing'. The reason for the weasly 'around' is the difficulty of separating the literal uses of 'lock, stock and barrel' from the figurative uses that don't refer directly to guns for example, the earliest use of the phrase that I have found is from James Ray's A Compleat History of the Rebellion, 1752: In fact it isn't particularly the earliest use of it appears to come from around the beginning of the 19th century. China, we might expect it to be very old. Given the antiquity of the three words that make up the phrase and the fact that guns have been in use since at least the Hundred Years' War in 1450, and even earlier in other countries e.g. If you prefer such nicety then your rifle's grooves are helicoid not spiral. Note again: that some make a distinction between spirals (that is, coiling around a fixed point - like a watch-spring) and helixes (that is, advancing around an axis - like a corkscrew). 'Rifle' derives from the French verb 'rifler' - to scratch or scrape. What makes rifles different from earlier guns are the spiral grooves inside the barrel, which cause the bullet to rotate and fly more truly. Note: that 'lock, stock and barrel' refers to muskets, not rifles. It may have been that the term migrated from cannons or other sorts of gun which were more barrel-shaped. After all, in the 15th century people would have been very familiar with barrels as the squat coopered tubs used for storage - hardly similar to the parallel-sided cylindrical tubes that were used in muskets. This is the least obvious of these three terms to have been chosen to name a musket part. The barrel, that is, a cylindrical object, is an even older word and was well-established by the 15th century. It was used as early as 1495 in association with Tudor guns, in a bill for 'gonne stokkes'. 'Stock' is the old term for wooden butt or stump and is a generic term for a solid base. The stock, which is the wooden butt-end of the gun. The term 'lock' was probably adopted because the mechanism resembles a door lock. Various forms of 'lock' muskets were used from the 1400s onwards, e.g. The lock, or flintlock, which is the firing mechanism. This explanation is entirely fanciful though - the 'whole thing' in question when this phrase originated was a musket. I've seen it suggested that this phrase refers to all of a shopkeeper's possessions - the stock in trade, the items stored in barrels and the lock to the door. What's the origin of the phrase 'Lock, stock and barrel'? Lock, stock and barrel means the whole thing, entire and complete. Lock, stock and barrel What's the meaning of the phrase 'Lock, stock and barrel'?
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