The Bad Old Days
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bad Old Days is an urban legend commonly circulated by email. It makes numerous wildly inaccurate claims about the origins of English idioms.
It most notably claims that at one time a twenty-fifth of all those buried were buried alive and that the expressions "saved by the bell" and "dead ringer" were derivatives of the practice of attaching a bell rope to the arm of the supposedly deceased in order to prevent live burials (see premature burial.)
