Pirate Words and Phrases: Meanings, Origins, Etc.

[HarborMaster]

Correct me if I am wrong but I believe "Shiver me Timbers" was derived from 12 pounders or better slamming in the ships hull or even better one of the masts during an engagement. The smell of black powder (nothing like it *S*) smoke.,probably fire death and destruction.,and in a creaky and near death voice a shiver me timbers shortly after the hull is breached and the ball settles into the main mast., a heavy blow from a 24 pounder.

[Fox]

I believe that "Shiver my timbers" is one of those phrases whose true origins will never be definitively known.

Out of interest, Nathaniel Butler has this to say on "Shivers"

...there are two sorts: the one of brass, the other of wood. The brazen ones are only in use in the heels of the topmasts. The wooden shivers are either of one whole piece of wood, and then are used in small pulleys only, or small blocks; or are made of quarters of wood, scarped or let one into another, and so used in the knights and winding tackle blocks; and into these shivers are put little square things, called coaks, which have holes in them; and these keep the shivers from splitting and galling of the pin of the block wherein they turn.

[Fox]

D'oh! While I was looking up "Larboard" in Coles' 1724 dictionary I could also have looked up "Sheave"...

"Sheevers, which run round in the pullies and block"

So, by the GAoP "sheave" would have been an accepted pronounciation.

[MorganTyre]

So, by the GAoP "sheave" would have been an accepted pronounciation.

Huzzah! Best news I've heard all day. Thanks.

[Capt Thighbiter]

sputcheon n

metal lining of the mouth of a scabbard

The blade rang against the sputcheon as he drew it, eliminating the element of surprise.

and

Bastinate v

to beat upon a person, usualy with a stick, on the soles of the feet. A favorite Spanish and Muslim punishment

Ouch!!!

[Lady Alyx]

I always liked the phrase...."shut yer gob"...where did gob come from?

[Red Cat Jenny]

Binnacle..

Where did that one come from?

[Coastie04]

From wikipedia.org:

Binnacle:

Before 18th century bittacle, through Span. bitacula, from Lat. habitaculum, a little dwelling

Gob:

-Gob is British English slang for mouth. Probably from Scottish or Irish Gaelic, mouth, beak, puckered mouth.

-Gob in Manx Gaelic means mouth, beak, muzzle, hook, bow (of ship), point, nosepiece, nose, spout, lip of jug, apex, nib, jet, pee of anchor, jut, headland, prominence, promontory, spit and is the name of river mouths or estuary points. See ManxNoteBook and usage/location Map

-Gob and gobbing are also British English slangs for spit and spitting - i.e. emissions from the gob.

-Gob is slang for sailor (usually US navy).

I thought the slang for sailor was kind of fitting for this topic. Granted, these are just from wikipedia, but it's at least one source for an explanation (though I wouldn't completely trust it without a second opinion).

Coastie

[Salty]

^ true

why are the belying pins.....well called belaying pins? on words always wondered about topic

[Dorian Lasseter]

Because they are pins that belay, or hold the lines....

Thus the phrase "Belay that order!"

[Lady Alyx]

In POTC2 one of the men on the ship that gets crushed by the Kraken..notates the sudden jar of the ship and exclaims:

Mother Carey's Chickens....where does that come from and mean?

[LongTom]

Because they are pins that belay, or hold the lines....

Thus the phrase "Belay that order!"

I'm extrapolating here, but I will guess that to belay a rope is to lay it down upon itself; the rope is laid (or in the older usage, be-layed) upon the pin in such a way that it is held fast by its own tension on the pin.

In other words, the "be" in belay is similar to the "be" in "bewitched" or "befuddled."

[Red Cat Jenny]

Binnacle:

Before 18th century bittacle,  a little dwelling

Aw..I'd live in a little binnacle sounds cozy.

[Lady Alyx]

Hey I answered my own question...check this out..this is so interesting in regards to Mother Carey's Chickens

Mother Carey's Chicken's one explaination

[Boucanier]

Does anyone know the origins of the phrase "a short life and a merry one." Any sources would be greatly appreciated. I seem to remember this phrase being attributed to Bartholomew Roberts but cannot seem to find any concrete evidence to supports this. Thought I read it in Johnson's but after searching through its pages for the phrase cannot find anything.

Thank you,

Bryan Stefancyk

[PirateQueen]

The quote in its entirety is:

"In an honest Service, says he, there is thin Commons, low Wages and hard Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at Choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one, shall be my Motto."

It's from the 1734 edition of :

A General and True History of the Lives and Actions of the most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c To which is added, A Genuine Account of the Voyages and Plunders of the most Noted Pirates

by Capt. Charles Johnson

The quote, attributed to Bart Roberts, can be found on p. 196. Here's an image of that page:

P. 196

You'll find the quote in the second column, about 2/3 down the page.

[TheBlackFox]

by Capt. Charles Johnson

hmmmm. . . . I don't put a lot of stock in his writings. There's so much incorrect in that book that a lot of piratical historians think that the writer might have been a pen name of DeFoe. . . . the information presented, especially about Bart Roberts and Blackbeard are very much in question. If you pick up the book "The Last Days of Blackbeard The Pirate" by Kevin Duffus, he's found a LOT of historical discrepancies with the accounts of "Capt. Johnson."

There's another recent pirate book that calls Johnson's statements into question, but I can't put my finger on the book as of yet (I'm reading 3 a month now).

[Raphael Misson]

What we can say that the phrase goes back to 1734 and would probably have been in use at that time and before. It almost certainly goes back farther than that, but print is the only definable way that I can think of that we have to trace words and phrases to certain periods. One of the interesting things I find about The Diary of Henry Teonge is that editor G.E. Manwaring has noted when Teonge's diary is the first print usage of various terms and words.

No book is absolutely factual. I would argue 'absolute factuality' nearly doesn't even exist in the human realm; it's more of an agreement to accept something as being a fact. (Actually, I have done so in Beyond several times.) The author of the General History appears to have gotten much of his info second hand which leaves the door open for all sorts of 'factual' errors. Every bit of print, including first hand accounts are open to errors in memory and re-telling. We interpret everything we take in. The most current research suggests that our memories are constructed of high points of events. When we 'recall' them, we actually go back and fill in the bits that were not high points, often, provably, incorrectly. However, the attribution is not disproved just because there are some disagreements in data between one source and another. I would argue it could never be disproved (unless someone invents a time machine). Still, I suspect Roberts would probably like that it was attributed to him even if he didn't say it. Like Picasso, he'd probably claim a work that increased his notoriety whether it was his or not.

As for the authorship of the General History, I used to think that Defoe was the author until I looked into it more deeply. The General History was not ascribed by historians to Defoe until the 1930s. I highly recommend the book The Canon-isation of Daniel Defoe by P.N Furbanks and W.R. Owens. There's a lot of evidence against Defoe as author while much of the evidence for it is rather weak. However, I won't re-recite it here - you can find what I learned on my webpage if you're curious:

http://www.markck.com/images/Piracy/Author...l%20History.htm

(Even if you do read that, I'd get a copy of the book and read it for myself if I were you. There's nothing like direct experience. I'm sure your local library can procure it for you.)

[Boucanier]

Many thanks to all those that have replied to the post! I greatly appreciate it.

Bryan Stefancyk

[TheBlackFox]

http://www.markck.com/images/Piracy/Author...l%20History.htm

(Even if you do read that, I'd get a copy of the book and read it for myself if I were you. There's nothing like direct experience. I'm sure your local library can procure it for you.)

Well spoke and very interesting. . . THANX!

[Raphael Misson]

AHA! I thought I had seen this elsewhere. I was searching through my notes for something else and I happened to come across a reference to this concept (if not the precise wording, nearly right and definitely the same idea) in Edward Barlow's Journal. Note that this entry pre-dates Bart Robert's birth, so we can write him out of the plot as being the origin of the phrase:

“[1668] …and poor seamen having but little money, and it being hungry times going always to short allowance of victuals, and the boats coming from the shore with wine and fruits on board of us to sell, and it being indifferent cheap, which made many of our poor men’s mouths to water to see good liquor before them, and I had not money to buy a drink of it, but they falling to their old trade for as long as the purser had any clothes or things that would either sell or change for wine, they would not be without as long as the purser would let them have any, running out so most part of their wages crying, ‘A merry life and a short’; ‘Longest liver take all’; and 'Never let us want when we have it and when we have it not too’.” (Barlow, p. 159-60)

Emphasis mine, of course. Again, it sounds from this account that the phrase was common among seamen.

An aside that sort of explains the reasoning of the men for saying this in regard to the sale of clothing by the purser. There was a custom during period of the purser of a ship selling clothes to the seamen (who frequently had no money) against their future pay. Pay was received when the voyage was completed. So the men could raise money by buying clothes at high prices, which they would then turn around and sell or trade at lower prices to local vendors. According to Barlow, this money was usually used to buy drink. (This was not the intent of selling the clothes, of course, and viewing this as a plot to cheat the men -as Barlow does- may not be fair at all.)

I believe I have detailed this elsewhere, but Barlow laid it out like this - the clothes cost 7 or 8 shillings in England, the purser sold them for 9 or 10 s. and the sailors sold them to the vendors for 3 or 4 s. Quite a raw deal, but if you read through several accounts, you'll find the sailors generally ran through whatever moneys they had very quickly on a voyage. The concept of the purser selling clothes at high prices is also detailed in Teonge's Diary, although he doesn't explain that the seamen turned around and sold the clothes to buy drink. Woodes Rogers also mentions that the men traded their warm clothes in a port after leaving England. He had six tailors busily sewing up makeshift clothing for the crew in preparation for reaching the nasty weather at Cape Horn. (He and his officers had tried to stop the men for trading their clothes so short-sightedly, but they would have none of it; their rationalization certainly followed that of "a short life and a merry one.")

[Boucanier]

Thanks Mission thats great stuff!

[Daniel]

"Fie" is one of my favorite curse words. You find it all over Shakespeare. I know at least one case in GAoP where it was used: Congreve wrote in 1695, "O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell."

On the other hand, I don't remember seeing the word "fie" anywhere in the General History of the Pirates, Moll Flanders, or anything else written in GAoP. Maybe Congreve was deliberately using an archaic term, instead of an everyday one? Does anyone know any other case when "fie" was used in GAoP?

[Mission]

I don't recall seeing it in the journals I've read, but then I wasn't really looking for it. Although it's not really the sort of word you would use in a journal - it's more something you would hear in speech (and thus in dialogue) or in poetry.

[Dutchman]

so how about fe fie fo fum? lets ask wikipedia..........

Earlier variants of the fairy tale Jack the Giant-Killer found in chapbooks include various renditions of the poem, recited by the giant Thunderdell:

Fee, fau, fum,

I smell the blood of an English man,

Be alive, or be he dead,

I'll grind his bones to make my bread.[1]

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum.

I smell the blood of an Englishman,

Be he living, or be he dead,

I’ll grind his bones to mix my bread.[2]

The latter two verses of the left version are the most famous in popular culture.

In William Shakespeare's play King Lear, the character of Edgar exclaims:

Fie, foh, and fum,

I smell the blood of a British man.

The phrase clearly makes use of the archaic word "fie", used to express disapproval.[3] This word is used repeatedly in Shakespeare's works, King Lear himself shouting, "Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!" and the character of Mark Antony (in Antony and Cleopatra) simply exclaiming "O fie, fie, fie!" The word "fum" has sometimes been interpreted as "fume".[1] Formations such as "fo" and "foh" are perhaps related to the expression "pooh!", which is used by one the giants in Jack the Giant-Killer;[2] such conjectures largely indicate that the phrase is of imitative origin, rooted in the sounds of flustering and anger.

[1]

[edit] References

^ a b c Tatar, Maria (2002). "Jack and the Beanstalk". The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.. pp. pp. 131 – 144. ISBN 0-393-05163-3.

^ a b History of Jack the Giant Killer. Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers. http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/is/enroom/chapbooks/historyjack.htm.

^ "fie". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The Houghton Mifflin Co.. 2000. http://www.bartleby.com/61/66/F0106600.html. Retrieved November 13, 2008.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee-fi-fo-fum"

Categories: English poems

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