What’s the origin of the warning phrase down goes your shanty!? This bit of menacing slang pops up in letters written by Civil War soldiers. One wrote, “If I ever get a chance to draw sight on a rebel, down goes his shanty.” It has a similar meaning to a phrase heard in Oklahoma: down goes your meat house! This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Down Goes Your Shanty”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Neil Smith-Willow calling from St. George Island, Florida.
What can we help you with?
Well, when I was a kid living in Pennsylvania and I had done something wrong, or if I was being warned not to do something wrong, my mother would look at me and say, and if you do that, then down goes your shanty to the bottom of the sea. Down goes your shanty to the bottom of the sea.
What did that mean? Did you cower when she said that?
I froze.
You froze?
I had no idea what it meant, but she was serious when she said it. Something out of her past, but I haven’t got the foggiest idea what it meant or where she might have picked it up.
So if my son does something, and I’m like, if you do that again, down goes your shanty to the bottom of the sea.
There you go. You got it exactly.
This is interesting. I don’t have a lot for you on this, but I have something. And one thing that we know for certain, that this appears in letters written by soldiers who were fighting in the American Civil War. And so that gives us a date and it gives us a context. We know at some point in history, this belonged to the language of the common person, right?
It’s not frequent. It doesn’t appear all that commonly in the historical record. It’s almost always just down goes your shanty. To the bottom of the sea part doesn’t usually occur. As a matter of fact, yeah, I don’t see it actually occurring anywhere else.
So it might have been your mother’s own addition.
Embellishment, yeah.
But what it reminds me of, we had one phone call recently from Tom in Dallas. And Tom reports growing up in Oklahoma and hearing down goes your meat house used in exactly the same way from the maid who lived and worked with his family.
So I don’t know how old he is, but at some point in the last hundred years, I guess. And I found a few examples of that when I was looking into Tom’s call of down goes your meat house, and it’s used identically. I mean, with the same kind of tone and register and situation, all of it. And I wonder if there’s a relationship there.
And you say it was used somewhere in the Civil War in writing and letters?
Yeah, it’s been called just down goes your shanty.
Yeah. Fortunately for us as language people, most of the letters from the Civil War period have, well, many of the letters from the Civil War period have been gathered up and collected. And they’re either available in book form or they’re in digital archives. And now we can mine them for lexical and language data. Here’s one. This is from somebody who, he was a second Wisconsin corporal. He says, if I ever get a chance to draw sight on a rebel, down goes his shanty. I’ll be darned.
Yeah. It’s not that common. My expectation is that belongs to some kind of song of the period that a town minstrel might sing or that somebody might perform on the stage, kind of a standard bit that you would hear at a political rally. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s an odd locution. What I think they mean by shanty, shanty historically has meant in the past, as it does now, a small house.
A very not…
Kind of ramshackle.
Yeah, yeah.
But it could just be the place where you hang your hat without any kind of pejorative judgment there.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder if other listeners have heard of this.
Let us know.
Yeah, if you’re in the part of the country where they use down goes your shanty or down goes your meat house, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.
Neil, thanks for calling.
Hey, thank you. That was very enlightening.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care now.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Be good.
A couple of things occurred to me regarding this reference while I listened to a podcast of this episode. First, the Civil War reference brought to mind the “body as a temple” concept found in the Bible, which a 19th C. soldier would have likely been familiar with. Thus, “if I get a chance to shoot a rebel, down goes the house of his soul.” This idea would also make sense for the more coarse “meat house,” as it could be taken to mean that a person’s soul resides in a “house made of meat.” I also, though, wonder if this could be somehow related to “chanties,” or sea-related work songs that would have also been fairly well known during the decades leading up to the Civil War… But I like the “house of your spirit” idea better.
What occurred to me when I listened to the phrase “down goes your shanty”, with out hearing any other suggestions, is that it means death. And I was thinking, if the Civil War soldiers wore Tam ‘o shanters, as many regiments have in various countries in the past, could the tam ‘o shanters have been nicknamed shanties? Then if you killed someone, their shanty, or hat, would definitley be going down as your body dropped to the ground.
I’d never heard “down goes your shanty” before listening to this episode, but, as an alum of the University of Pennsylvania, I was struck by the similarity of the caller’s phrase to the second line of Penn’s traditional “battle cry” song, Hang Jeff Davis. The song goes:
Hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree
Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea
She’s my Annie, and I’m her Joe,
Oh, listen to my tale of
(Whoa!)
Any ice today lady?
No.
Gitty-up!
Jeff Davis is obvious, but there’s a lot of mystery around McGinty, and why he was being sent to the bottom of the sea. The shanty parallel doesn’t really solve that, but it’s interesting.