Der Doktor

Greetings friends. A tip of the hat to Boowana and Sputnik for their excelleny recon efforts. After seeing a bunch of S2000-style start button pix the last few months, this seems to have dropped off the radar screen. I read on article months ago that they were dropping it, but continued to see picture after picture that all looked like it was there. Is the start button still in?

pmacwill

dead

Hercules

as a doorknob

tallguylehigh

or a doornail :D

zoom44

yeah definetly doornail

ZoomZoom

All of the rx8 articles said that the start button was gonzo since last April/May.

Hercules

I typed that the first time and it didn't sound right to me... wtf is a doornail?

wakeech

it SHOULD be pretty obvious, even to the most thick-headed of ancient Greek demi-gods... sheesh!!
the term "door nail" would pertain to all straight fasteners which are pounded through all materials of the referenced door, to hold it fast together.

73JPS

Wakeech

In the most complimentary fashion, I must commend you: you truly are a most excellent big-headed-know-it-all!

danger

why did they axe the start button?!?

Hercules

Dunno..

but it's gone, gone for good. So I figure we best get used to it

zoom44

from ask jeeves:
This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare's Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.
But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Could it be because of the repetition of sounds, and the much better rhythm of the phrase compared with the version without door? Almost certainly the euphony has caused the phrase to survive longer than the alternatives I've quoted. But could there something special about a doornail?

The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.

But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can't be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can't use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they'd been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it's right or not we will probably never know.

IGOZMZM

Alot of people have custom installed their own red start button in Miata's, the button gets installed where the cig lighter is. Now that wouldn't be such a bad idea considering the cig lighter is hidden under the center console so even if someone stole your keys to get past the engine immobilzer they wouldn't be able to start it unless they knew about the hidden button :D