owen byrne writes quoting URL shiver my timbers from tad spencer please could you tell me where the phrase shiver my timbers originated this is one of those supposedly nautical expressions that seem to be better known through a couple of appearances in fiction than by any actual sailors usage it s an exclamation that may allude to a ship striking some rock or other obstacle so hard that her timbers shiver or shake so implying a calamity has occurred it is first recorded as being used by captain frederick marryat in jacob faithful in NUMBER i won t thrash you tom shiver my timbers if i do it seems implausible to me that shiver here means to shake i don t recall seeing the word used transitively in that sense and webNUMBER lists that sense as v i or intransitive the transitive sense of shiver which we no longer use but which people used widely in the NUMBERs webNUMBER doesn t even list it as archaic or obsolete means to shatter into splinters normally with a blow shivering a boat s timbers of course leaves you with no boat shivering some of them which will happen if you hit a rock hard enough leaves you with a sinking boat so shiver my timbers if i do can be reasonably interpreted as a more vivid way of saying may i die suddenly if i do the interpretation suggested by quinion may my boat be damaged neither makes as much sense in context nor obeys the normal rules of grammar i ve sent a copy of this to quinion 