I use the saying as dead as a door nail a lot, but i am not even sure what it means. How dead is a door nail?
by 
gerrik
ANSWERS: 5
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Well as it's an in-animate object lacking in a circulatory system I would say very dead. It has never been alive, so there.
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Very dead, as in made of metal and lacking any kind of cell structure.
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I always assumed "dead as a door nail" referred to the nails they hammered into the "door" of your coffin lid once you had died.
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At the time that the saying was coined, nails were usually wooden pegs used for much the same purpose that metal nails are used now: to hold together wooden structures, particularly in timber framed houses. Given the heavy use that doors get, a wooden nail from a door might fall out. In which case you would have this small wooden peg of very, very old wood. Which was about as far from alive as anything once living could be. Of course, the alliteration helps.
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Uh,the real answer goes like this. No matter how hard you hit a nail that too on the head, nothing happens. Hitting a dead person on the head also has no effect. This is the similarity. Hitting a nail on the head and hitting a dead person on the head has no difference. That is the reason people say 'As dead as a door nail' but mostly the saying goes like 'As dead as a dodo' A dodo is an extinct flightless bird of Mauritius (an island of the Indian Ocean), one of the three species that constituted the family Raphidae, usually placed with pigeons in the order Columbiformes but sometimes separated as an order (Raphiformes). The birds were first seen by Portuguese sailors about 1507 and were exterminated by man and his introduced animals. The dodo was extinct by 1681-1790
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