THE CAT'S PAJAMAS XLI

Tad Tuleja

A collection of the (mostly) true origins of familiar phrases

DIME A DOZEN

One of the more obscure forms of Buddhist meditation practiced in traditional Japan was known as Daimdu Zen. Daimdu literally means "bent nail," but is more generally applied to any small, insignificant object. Members of the Daimdu school would kneel for hours or even days in meditation, their eyes fixed intently on a bent nail, in order to attain what their founder, the 16th-  century monk Subaru Toyota, described as "the supreme knowledge of the small." That is, the understanding that the least significant of material objects was still capable of releasing one's "Buddha nature."

The subtlety of this concept was lost on the American merchant sailors who followed Commodore Perry into Japan. To them, "dimduzen" meant merely an appreciation of trifles. The punning expression dime a dozen was invented around 1860 to ridicule not only the "bent nail" concept, but Oriental mysticism in general. To those intent on opening up the East to capitalist enterprise, nails and holy men were equally common - and equally worthless.