5 thoughts on “Oh, no!”

1. Tiger, I missed it too. I had planned to talk to customers all day in Pirate, but missed the opportunity. “Would ye like light or d-arrgh-k roast, matey?” Don’t worry though lass, we can be speaking like pirates all year round or my timbers don’t need shivering.

2. Lad, what exactly does shiver me timbers mean, anyway?

3. Avast, the lassie speaks! This is what I be findin’ on yer question.

   “I think you’re exaggerating when you say that pirates say the phrase “all the time.” Robert Louis Stevenson used the phrase just THREE times in his novel “Treasure Island.” Although the phrase was known to pirates before Stevenson used it, he is the one who made it famous. [And then the Disney people got hold of it . . . .]

   The phrase means “shock” or “sudden surprise,” as the wooden masts or timbers of a ship would quake when the ship was hit by a cannonball, or if the ship suddenly ran aground or hit an unsuspecting object — think “whale” in “Moby Dick” or the great white shark in “Jaws.”

   The “Phrase Finder” folk at Sheffield Hallam University — the leading authority of phrase history — and the standard reference book “Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable” do not have a specific origin for the phrase. One suspects that an unknown pirate first used it, and it just caught on. The shivering or quaking referred to the wooden boards or the masts of the old ships, when they were suddenly hit by a cannonball or some other powerful force/object.”

4. Whoa….somebody’s been doing their homework.

5. Arr, shiver me timbers!

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