The Devil To Pay!

Meaning: Impending trouble or other bad consequences following from one's actions.

Origin: People seem to love ascribing nautical origins to phrases. Here's a good case in point. The 'devil' is a seam between the planking of a wooden ship. Admiral William Henry Smyth defined the term in The Sailor's Word-book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms, 1865:  Devil - The seam which margins the waterways on a ship's hull.

'Paying' is the sailor's name for caulking or plugging the seam between planking with rope and tar etc. 'Paying the devil' must have been a commonplace activity for shipbuilders and sailors at sea. Many sources give the full expression used by seafarers as "there’s the devil to pay and only half a bucket of pitch", or "there’s the devil to pay and no pitch hot". Nautical origin; case closed? Well, no.

The phrase doesn't originate from the name of the ship's seam, as is sometimes supposed.

The other meaning of paying the Devil alludes to Faustian pacts in which hapless individuals pay for their wishes or misdeeds by forfeiting their soul. This allusion, and the everyday usage meaning 'I am in trouble now, I will have to pay for this later', date from the 18th century. For example, Thomas Brown's Letters From the Dead to the Living, 1707:

Don't you know damnation pays every man's scores... we knew we should have the Devil to pay one time or other, and now you see like honest men we have pawned our Souls for the whole Reckoning.

This quotation predates the earliest recorded usage of 'devil' to mean the seam of a ship (Smyth's Sailor's Workbook, 1865) by more than a century. Given the known nautical meaning of 'paying' a seam and the well-established phrase 'the Devil to pay', sailors probably adopted the phrase in reference to the unpleasant task of seam caulking.

Clearly, the devil in the phrase was originally a reference to Satan, not the seam of a ship.

In Context: You better be home by midnight or you’ll have the devil to pay! 

Think About It: If one must pay for bad choices, what do good choices earn?