Since we’re well into winter in the northern hemisphere, what could be more appropriate than diving into the phrase “shiver me timbers”? Well…ok, it’s possible there could be one or two more appropriate things. Anyway, “shiver me timbers” may well be well known today because of movies about pirates, starting with the 1950 Disney film Treasure Island. After all, that’s where the “arrrggh” came from that’s now considered standard pirate-talk; it was introduced by Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver.
But “shiver me timbers” was a real phrase, probably dating from about the early 1800s. “Shiver” in his case means “to break or split into small fragments,” and it’s not the same “shiver” that’s we’re feeling in the winter. This “shiver” comes from the German word “schever,” which means to splinter. It appeared in English in the 1200s. The other “shiver” — the one that means to shake with cold or fear — probably comes from the Middle English word “chivere,” which meant chattering your teeth. “Chivere,” for its part, came from the Old English word for jaw, “ceafl.”
The timbers getting shivered might refer to the wooden beams that ships were made out of, or it might mean legs. “Timbers” was a slang term for legs back in the day. In any case, it’s quite possible that “shiver me timbers,” even when it was used outside movies, was never meant to be a serious saying. There’s evidence that its primary usage has always been something just humorously attributed to sailors, not something they really said.
That archetypical sailor who might or might not have said “shiver me timbers” might have also been called a “matross.” “Matross” is now obsolete, but was derived from the Dutch word “matroos,” meaning a sailor of the lowest rank. The word entered English around 1600, and was used in a number of ways, all in military contexts. A “matross” meant, at various times and in various contexts, an army private, a gunner, and an artillery soldier one rank below a gunner.
What would a soldier subordinate to a gunner do? Help load the gun, of course. Back in those days each individual shot was the culmination of a process of cleaning the barrel, loading a charge of gunpowder, inserting a lead ball, tamping the whole works down, and preparing whatever variety of “lock” that gun had that would provide the actual spark needed to “fire” the gun. Which, if it was a naval gun, might end up shivering some timbers, at which the enemy captain (being filmed by the secondary camera crew and the first assistant director) would exclaim “Arrrrrgh!”
