Origin of Shiver Me Timbers

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there, how you doing?

Great. Who’s this?

This is Alex calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi Alex, welcome to the program.

Hey Alex.

What’s cooking?

Hey there.

Back when we were having all this cold weather in Indianapolis, my fiance who works at a salon was talking to one of her clients and they were going on about how cold it was.

And my girl goes, just makes me feel like shiver me timbers.

And she kind of paused and the girl looked at her.

It was in her chair and they both kind of started laughing.

And she goes, I don’t know why, but that made me feel a little dirty, almost like a little weird to say that after the fact.

Shiver me timbers?

That sounds naughty.

Yeah, I mean, you know, that’s where I heard it from is like all these, you know, pirate movies as a kid.

But, you know, listening to the show every now and then, you learn that sometimes these phrases really aren’t connected with what we associate them with.

So we were kind of curious where it came from.

That’s right. You’re right in this case for sure.

Shiver Me Timbers doesn’t have anything to do at all with shivering.

Well, not the shiver that we all think of when we get cold.

Right.

Yeah, Alex, there’s another shiver in English that means to split into pieces, just to completely splinter.

And if you’re an old sailor on the ship and you’re talking about shiver me timbers or shiver my timbers, what you’re talking about is splitting the big beams in the ship from either weather or attack.

Oh, right. So if you shiver me timbers, you’re breaking apart my ship.

Yeah.

Yeah, see, I was thinking it had to do with, like, if they were sailing through a cold, you know, cold area, maybe the wood, they were like shiver me tempers as in their boat.

Everything was so cold.

Yeah.

That’s what I always thought it was.

Are you old enough to remember the Popeye cartoons?

Yeah, yeah.

In fact, they used to be on with Forky the Pig.

I mean, I’m 26, so I think I caught it really at the tail end of it all.

I think, yes, the far tail end.

Yeah. But you may recall that Popeye used to run around singing shiver me timbers, blow me down if you ain’t the prettiest girl in town.

So he was maybe a later popularizer of the phrase.

But Robert Louis Stevenson also popularized that phrase in Treasure Island.

Oh, yeah. He’s in a couple of his books, right?

Yeah, a couple of his books.

But the phrase, as far as we can tell, actually goes back to the late 1700s.

And there were lots of different versions of it, like shiver my timbers, shiver me timbers, shiver my top sail, start my timbers, smite my timbers.

Interesting.

Yeah, the idea being just completely destroy my life.

Yeah, that’s funny.

Well, I was wondering, actually, after I initially inquired about it, if it’s just like one of those things that you maybe heard so many times as a young child through these little TV shows that you were watching and really not consciously aware of.

But then it’s like stuck in your head and it comes up every now and then.

You’re like, why do I want to say shiver me timbers?

That’s why we exist.

It’s not a bad mild oak, really.

Come on.

Right?

What’s going on here?

Yeah. As a mild oath, it’s not bad.

That’s right. You can catch yourself from saying something else.

You know, shit, permy timbers.

Or something like that, yeah.

Alex, something worth noting is that even in the early uses, it is almost always kind of a fake term.

There’s very little evidence that real sailors ever used this term.

It pops up in parodies and satire and theater pieces and jocular commentary and little ditties made by people who probably never set foot in the water once in their life, you know?

Yeah, it’s pretty cartoonish.

I couldn’t really see burly pirates saying, shiver me timber.

It’s like saying, I have a case of the Mondays at a construction site.

You’re going to get debt.

That’s good.

Exactly.

That was legitimate lingo there.

Exactly. You’re right. It’s very cartoonish.

I think they would say something far more, shall we say, salty.

A little, yes. A little more color, for sure.

Yeah, definitely.

Thanks, Alex.

Well, interesting. Well, cool. Well, thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

Take care now.

Thanks a lot, Alex. Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

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