Thread: shiver me timbers

Dunno how true it is, but my grandmother told me years ago that the devil was part of a ship, the keel or similar?? and to pay it meant a repair of some kind. I think it meant to seal it with pitch or something...

By inference, then, if you were between the devil and the deep blue sea, you would be effecting said repair.

regards,
Rus.

Originally Posted by Rusty

Dunno how true it is, but my grandmother told me years ago that the devil was part of a ship, the keel or similar?? and to pay it meant a repair of some kind. I think it meant to seal it with pitch or something...

By inference, then, if you were between the devil and the deep blue sea, you would be effecting said repair.

regards,
Rus.

That's a very nice story, but if you trust http://www.word-detective.com/back-l2.html it is untrue. The phrase was used on land 200 years before being used on sea, and the records are clear that devil refers to Satan. The same goes for "The devil to pay" which since around 1400 refers to a bargain with Satan.

G'day.


I could only find the popular Nautical origins quoted similar to what Rusty came up with.

Originally Posted by Cliff Rogers

I could only find the popular Nautical origins quoted similar to what Rusty came up with.

From the Oxford English Dictionary definition of devil:

13. Naut. ‘The seam which margins the waterways on a ship's hull’ (Smyth Sailor's Word-bk.); ‘a seam between the garboard-strake and the keel’ (Funk and Wagnall).
**Hence various writers derive the phrase ‘the devil to pay and no pitch hot’; but this is prob. only a secondary and humorous application of ‘the devil to pay’: cf. 22j.

22*j. the devil to pay.
**Supposed to refer to the alleged bargains made by wizards, etc., with Satan, and the inevitable payment to be made to him in the end. It has also been attributed to the difficulty of ‘paying’ or caulking the seam called the ‘devil’, near a ship's keel, whence the expanded form ‘the devil to pay and no pitch hot’. But there is no evidence that this is the original sense, and it has never affected the general use of the proverb.
*
**

I heard the same sort of thing with the devil being the pitch that was applied inbetween the planks on the keel line.
Also, to freeze the balls off a brass monkey also has naval origins with the monkey being a brass plate one which cast iron canon balls were stacked, on freezing nights the contraction rate of brass was much greater/faster than that of the iron and the canon balls would fall off the monkey.
Trivia mode off (and Trivia comes from latin tri-via, a three way intersection where people would stop and exchange gossip on the way to or from market).

Gosh there ar sum eddicated peoples hear on thiss BB.

The Timboon Terrorist must be bored today :confused:
Back to finishing kitchen before SWMBO gets home

When I saw the heading of this chain, I expected that it was about the Melbourne re-cycled timber supplier in the Williamstown area. Shows what branding does, forgot about the origin of the phrase all together.