Hello everyone!

Today there is an extract from the most popular Christmas story! I’m sure you guessed it already! You are right! A Christmas Carol by C. Dickens. We have an idiom to clarify:

 MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker,

and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a

door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that

Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

I’m sorry for such a topic during holidays but a lot of people are confused right in the beginning of the story. What does it mean as dead as a door-nail?

The meaning is dead, devoid of life

There are some similar idioms:

·        As dead as a herring

·        dead as a mutton

·         dead as a stone

Explore books and you will find even more interesting idioms!