Sun, Aug 03, 2003 page9

• `Katie bar the door,' but was she a woman with derring-do?

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  When Senator Larry Craig of Idaho held up approval of Air Force promotions until four cargo jets were supplied to his state's Air National Guard, a Pentagon officer -- speaking on the deepest of background -- vowed to resist. "If we say yes to this," he or she told The New York Times' Eric Schmitt, "Katie bar the door."

  Peter Brown on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts (I like it when an e-mailer identifies the place he's writing from) asks: "Who was the first Katie and why would the US Air Force ask her to bar its door? Put a crack team of phrase sleuths to effort that request, double time."

  Because my part-time researcher is named Katy Miller (spelled with a y, the decision of a minority of Catherines and Kathleens), I designated her as the crack team.

  The world's leading expert on this is Michael Quinion, who once occupied a seat like mine at Britain's Daily Telegraph and, though the author of Oxford Press' new Ologies and Isms, is not fixated on affixes. He came up with an 1894 poem by James Whitcomb Riley about a girl named Lide who infuriated her parents by marrying a drunkard: "Long after she'd eloped with him and married him for shore!/When Lide married him, it was `Katy, bar the door!'"

  That popularized the phrase in the US, but the context suggests an earlier ballad. Quinion dug up a poem, The King's Tragedy, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published three years before Riley's, about Catherine Douglas, lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Scotland.

  When the tyrannical James I was under attack, the family retreated to a room whose door had metal staples for a wooden bar, but with the bar missing. As assassins pounded on the door, the plucky "Catherine Douglas sprang to the door" as the royalty shouted, "Catherine, keep the door!" She courageously if foolhardily placed her slender arm in the staples. But it was soon broken, and the king was murdered.

  But wait! Another Scottish ballad, of medieval vintage, may be the source. A husband and wife each stubbornly refuse to lock the door for the other; whoever speaks first has to do it. When robbers break in, the husband gives a yell, losing the contest: "Then up and started our good wife/Gave three skips on the floor;/`Good man, ye've spoken the foremost word./Get up and bar the door.'" The ballad's title, Get Up and Bar the Door, lacks only the woman's name.

  Which is the origin of "Katie, bar the door"? I like to think the legend of Catherine Bar-lass, as she came to be known, is the source. The meaning of the phrase, sometimes hyphenated, usually introduced by "it's" to suggest a metaphor to come, is more alarmist than "Watch out!" "It's Katie, bar the door" suggests that if some concession showing weakness is made to the barbarians at the gate, they'll all come swarming in to overwhelm the tyrant (who deserved it) and Katie, who assuredly did not.

  DERRING-DO

  "If we want our people to make more decisions for themselves," said Singapore's prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, whose government has been accused of being autocratic, "and if we are to encourage a derring-do society, we must allow some risk-taking and a little excitement."

  The critic John Leonard, in a New York Times review of J.K. Rowling's latest Harry Potter novel, noted that an earlier work by that author "seemed to lump and lurch about, as if to suck in air before derring yet more do."

  Just what is "derring-do", how did it come about and is there a "derring-don't"?

  This is not one of your latest slang concoctions. Geoffrey Chaucer, in his 1374 Troilus and Criseyde, wrote that the knight Troilus was "in no degree secounde" (in modern English, second to none) "in dorryng don at longeth to a knight" -- in "daring to do" the sort of act belonging to, or expected of, brave knights.

  The Middle English "dorryng don," the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, has gone through a series of misunderstandings and misspellings. Edmund Spenser picked it up in 1579 as "derring doe," which was defined at the time as "in manhood and chivalrie." By the time of Ivanhoe, in 1820, Sir Walter Scott used "a deed of such derring-do" to mean "desperate courage."

  That meaning changed in the past century to "daring action," as in the reviewer Leonard's self-mocking, dehyphenated usage "derring yet more do."

  But of late, the ancient compound has lost some of its heroic quality and gained a connotation of "admirable if somewhat reckless gustiness." In The Tallahassee Democrat recently, the Leon County commissioner, Bob Rackleff, noted the reluctance of the county to sell land popular with cyclists because of its bumpy terrain: "It's because of those steep slopes that they get to do their hair-raising stunts of derring-do."

  Goh's definition is "daring action," but his English usage is still zigging while the meaning has zagged. If Singapore becomes a "derring-do society," good luck to its reckless residents.

  MEBBESO

  Whenever I want to express skepticism, I eschew the dull "maybe," the sneering "sure," the pompous "perhaps," and turn to the dialect compound "mebbeso." Readers have asked for its derivation.

  Could it be from the Maybeso Valley on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska? Creeks in that state leading to some unknown outlet sometimes carry that name. Also, in a 1938 Oklahoma slave narrative, an aged woman named Lucinda Davis, raised by Creek Indians, is quoted as saying, "Maybeso dey buy demselves out." William Sydney Porter -- O. Henry -- used it in a 1907 Western short story.

  I'm not from the Southwest or Alaska, and it is unlikely that I picked up this frontier-ish locution at the Bronx High School of Science in New York. But I was an avid fan of the radio series The Lone Ranger and may have picked it up from dialogue placed in the mouth of the faithful sidekick, Tonto. That's speculative. Could be. Mebbeso.
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