len, obsessed by so ancient a tradition,
should accept uncritically the landsman's spelling. But educated
sailors devoid of 'literary' pretensions have always written the word
as it was pronounced. To my mind the strongest argument against the
literary landsman's derivation of the word is that the British sailor
cultivated the supremest contempt for everything French, and would be
the last person to label such a definitely British practice as
shanty-singing with a French title. If there had been such a thing in
French ships as a labour-song bearing such a far-fetched title as
(_un_) _chante_, there might have been a remote possibility of the
British sailor adopting the French term in a spirit of sport or
derision, but there is no evidence that any such practice, or any such
term, achieved any vogue in French ships. As a matter of fact, the
Oxford Dictionary (which prints it '_sh_anty') states that the word
never found its way into print until 1869.

The truth is that, however plausible the French derivation theory may
sound, it is after all pure speculation--and a landsman's speculation
at that--unsupported by a shred of concrete evidence.

If I wished to advance another theory more plausible still, and
equally unconvincing, I might urge that the word was derived from the
negro hut-removals already mentioned. Here, at least, we have a very
ancient custom, which would be familiar to British seamen visiting
West Indian seaports. The object moved was a _shanty_; the music
accompanying the operation was called, by the negroes, a _shanty_
tune; its musical form (solo and chorus) was identical with the sailor
_shanty_; the pulls on the rope followed the same method which
obtained at sea; the soloist was called a _shanty_man; like the
shantyman at sea he did no work, but merely extemporized verses to
which the workers at the ropes supplied the chorus; and finally, the
negroes still pronounce the word itself exactly as the seaman did.

I am quite aware of the flaws in the above argument, but at least it
shows a manual labour act performed both afloat and ashore under
precisely similar conditions as to (_a_) its nature, (_b_) its musical
setting; called by the same name, _with the same pronunciation_ in
each case; and lastly, connected, in one case, with an actual hut or
_shanty_. Against this concrete argument we have a landsman's abstract
speculation, which (_a_) begs the whole question, and (_b_) which was
never heard of u