Saved by the bell is actually boxing slang, dating from the 1930s. A contestant being counted out might be saved by the ringing of the bell for the end of the round, giving him a minute to recover. Graveyard shift is an evocative term for the night shift between about midnight and eight in the morning, when — no matter how often you’ve worked it — your skin is clammy, there’s sand behind your eyeballs, and the world is creepily silent, like the graveyard (sailors similarly know the graveyard watch, the midnight to four a.m. stint). The phrase dates only from the early years of the twentieth century. The third phrase — dead ringer — dates from roughly the same period or perhaps a decade or two earlier And what about the dead ringer? Many people know of equally preposterous stories associated with the expanded term dead ringer. A common one is that people in Victorian times were so afraid of being buried while still alive that they had their coffins fitted with a string and a bell so they could attract the attention of a graveyard attendant if they woke up. Though the fear of premature burial was indeed intense and various inventions that included bells were really developed to reassure people, the expression has nothing to do with the matter. It’s just ringer with dead added to give the phrase greater emphasis. It’s known from the 1890s — my earliest example is from an Ohio newspaper in 1893: “Israel Williams wearing a wig would be no longer Israel Williams, but would be a dead ringer for Wellington just before the battle of Waterloo.” Incidentally, the Australian sense of ringer, for the top gun or best-performing shearer in a shed, comes originally from a much older English dialect word meaning something outstanding or superlative. So none of these expressions has anything to do with the burying of bodies. So, Do it again, and get it right