Elvis, a nice Jewish boy
QUESTION Was Elvis Presley Jewish?
ORTHODOX Judaism practises matrilineal descent: if your birth mother was Jewish then you are too. Under this rule, Elvis Presley was Jewish.
Genealogists have confirmed his maternal great-great-grandmother Nancy Burdine was a Jewish woman who was born in Mississippi in 1826 and died in 1887.
Her family had moved to the US from what is now Lithuania around the time of the American Revolution. Burdine’s greatgranddaughter Gladys Love Smith married Vernon Presley in 1933 and gave birth to Elvis in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935. The family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, when Elvis was 13.
There is compelling proof that Gladys was Jewish. In 2018, her gravestone was taken out of storage where it had been placed by Vernon to deter thieves and put on display in Graceland, Elvis’s former home. Designed by Elvis, it had a Star of David in the top lefthand corner.
The Presleys once lived in an apartment under that of the family of Rabbi Alfred Fruchter, the first principal of the Memphis Hebrew Academy. Elvis was the Fruchters’ Shabbos goy, who performs the household tasks (melakha) for observant Jews that are forbidden by orthodox law (halakha) on the Sabbath.
The Rabbi’s son Harold has said his parents ‘never had even an inkling’ that Elvis had any Jewish roots and would not have employed him if they had known.
Elvis was a practising Christian, and recorded three gospel albums – His Hand In Mine, How Great Thou Art and He Touched Me. However, he remained open to other religions. In the 1970s, he wore several religious symbols, including a cross, Star of David, Egyptian ankh and crescent moon and star to represent Islam. When asked why he wore them all, Elvis replied: ‘I don’t want to miss heaven on a technicality.’
Justine Brookshaw, London.
QUESTION Is the expression ‘know your onions’ a reference to the grammarian Charles Talbut Onions?
THE expression to ‘know your onions’ means to be very knowledgeable or experienced. However erudite a lexicographer C.T. Onions was, he certainly wasn’t the source of the saying.
The phrase began life in the US, while Onions was born in Birmingham in England and was a lifelong academic in Oxford.
A poem in the February 1908 issue of The Postal Record, a US journal of the National Association of Letter Carriers, uses the expression when referring to Billy, an experienced post horse:
But, never mind; Billy knows his onions,
He is not troubled with corns or bunions.
He travels along at a good, fair gait;
Unless the roads are bad, he is never late.
The first human example was recorded in The University Tongue, a short story by Altha Leah Bass, in the March 1922 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
When Ruth returns home from college, her mother asks if she has a good English teacher. Ruth replies: ‘Mr Roberts knows his onions, all right.’ Later, Ruth’s father says that parents, like students, can ‘learn their onions’.
The phrase mirrors these: ‘He knows his flock’ (1621), ‘he knows his catechism’ (1723), ‘he knows his business’ (1744), ‘she knows her letters’ (1799) and ‘they know their trade’ (1800).
Substituting a vegetable for an occupation was typical of early 20th-century US journalism, which was fond of comical allusions. Other examples of foods starting with a vowel were used to describe excellence – to know one’s oats, one’s oil, one’s apples, one’s eggs – but onions won out.
Another example was describing something excellent in terms of an animal’s anatomy: the ant’s pants, the sardine’s whiskers and the bee’s knees. Regardless, C.T. Onions, the tireless fourth editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was not a household name in Britain, never mind the US.
Tina Smart, Cambridge.
QUESTION Who invented the shower?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, in November 1985, as a UK National Coal Board (NCB) mining surveyor, I was sent to the newly closed Markham Colliery, Gwent, to measure the depth of two mine shafts being filled.
One of the few employees left, involved in the closure and making safe of the colliery, was Clive Seabourne. He was superintendent of the pithead baths, which were actually rows of showers.
Built in 1936, these were used by 2,500 men. At the time, this was highly innovative, as before this the miners went home dirty and washed in a tin bath in front of a fire in their kitchen or living room. Clive told me that when the showers were first opened, the first batch of men up from the pit took off their dirty clothes and sat on the floor under the showers to wash, as if they were in their own tin baths. They had to be told they should stand under the water.
I found it highly amusing to picture hundreds of men sitting in rows washing each other’s backs!
Lyn Pask, Blackwood, Gwent.
QUESTION Is there a world record for sneezing? What other records would no one want?
THE Guinness Book of World Records for sneezing belongs to Donna Griffiths, who started on January 13, 1981 and carried on for another 976 days. During the first 365 days, she sneezed an estimated one million times.
Charles Osborne holds the world record for hiccuping. He was weighing a pig in 1922 when he started. He was still going 68 years later in 1990, after an estimated 430million hiccups.
It took nine doctors 16 hours to remove a giant tumour weighing 17st 4lb from 37-year-old Yang Jianbin in China in 2014.
Chief surgeon Chen Minliang said: ‘This is the biggest nerve tumour we ever saw.’
Debbie Shaw, Luton, Bedfordshire.
O Is there a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, DMG Media, Two Haddington Buildings, 20-38 Haddington Road, Dublin 4, D04 HE94. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles. legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.