where does the saying katie bar the door come from
Catherine Douglas The idiomatic phrase "Katy, bar the door!" (a warning of the approach of trouble) may have its origins in the story of Catherine Douglas.[4] Dante Gabriel Rossetti recounted the story of Catherine Douglas in verse in 1881, under the title "The King's Tragedy". This poem contains the line "Catherine, keep the door!"
Churchkey The term in the beverage-opening sense is apparently not an old one; Merriam-Webster finds written attestation only since the 1950s.[8] Several etymological themes exist. The main one is that the ends of some bottle openers resemble the heads of large keys such as have traditionally been used to lock and unlock church doors.[9] The other is that jocularity helped propel the popular spread of the name, with the joke being that opening a beer is an activity that usually has little to do with pious or ecclesiastical circumstancesâ€”historical connections between monasteries and brewing notwithstanding.