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As heavy as a dead priest

Posted by Victoria S Dennis on August 16, 2011 at 18:27

In Reply to: As heavy as a dead priest posted by Susan Gilmore on August 12, 2011 at 15:28:

: My mother, who was from north Florida, (born 1912) often used the expression "It's as heavy as a dead priest". No one else had heard it, until a friend said her mom who grew up in CT, also used the expression. How did it get started?

This is a wild guess: a "priest" is the name for a mallet used by anglers to knock landed fish on the head to kill them quickly: it's called that because it gives them the "last rites".

Just possibly the original expression was "as heavy as a [fisherman's] priest", and somebody who didn't fully understand that, and wondered why anyone would be carrying a man of the Church, embellished it to "a dead priest". (VSD)

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