"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/10/17 (brass monkey)

Anyone investigating the origins of words will quite often refer to a certain body that operates under the acronym CANOE. And CANOE stands for Committee to Ascribe a Nautical Origin to Everything. That's because so many words in English are said to have begun their lives on the high seas and, as you can probably tell, not all of them are true. But one of the most hotly disputed stories of all involves the saying brass monkeys. If you talk about brass monkeys weather, it's incredibly cold and in full, the expression is to freeze the balls of brass monkey. It's said to come frome triangles that supported large kind of pyramid-style stacks of iron candles that were held on sailing ships - military sailing ships. But the plot does thicken a little bit, because we do know a naval cannon itself was known as a monkey and the boys that loaded the cannons, the cannons on naval ships were called powder monkeys. So a nautical origin is just about possible, but where it gets confusing  is that the cannonballs came along after a whole line of other sayings involving brass monkey. Most of them involve extremes of hot or cold weather. So you would have, "It's hot enough to singe the hair off a brass monkey", "hot enough to burn the ears off a brass monkey", you could also talk the legs, not off the donkey, but off of  brass monkey. You might not have the brains of a brass monkey, or you could touch the heart of a brass monkey if you did something very, very kind. There's a whole line of expressions involving this brass figure. Which means in the end, with all those bodily references, that the balls in question are simply testicles with an added punning referense to those monkeys that I mentioned, which were the cannons on naval ship. So the sea does come into itsomewhere, but it's a very, very thick plot that you have to really kind of get into to find out the thruth.