Bar The Door

Armos stay hot and roll to vict'ry in Texas

KATY, TX - All sayings come from somewhere. The phrase "Katy bar the door" is used mostly in the United States, but didn't originated here. The first known use of "Katy bar the door" in print with the meaning of "trouble is in store" is from James Whitcomb Riley's poem When Lide Married Him in 1894. Riley's work can't be the origin of the expression because his readers would have had to been familiar with the phrase for it to make any sense in this poem to begin with. The phrase also appears in the traditional Scottish folk song "Get Up and Bar the Door" published by the Scottish song collector and editor David Herd, in his collection Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc., in 1776. The basis of the song is the stubbornness of a husband and wife who disagree about who should lock the front door and make a pact that whoever speaks first would have to do it, thereby allowing uninvited strangers to enter the house. This origin doesn't mention Katy and it isn't American, although it can be explained somewhat by the emigration of many Scots to America at the end of the 19th century. However, it does correspond with the meaning of the phrase which links the failure to "bar the door" with impending doom, or big trouble. The dominate theory is that the phrase originated with the story of Katherine Douglas who tried to prevent the assassination of King James I of Scotland on February 20, 1437. The transcripts are sketchy, but she was a member of the powerful Douglas Clan and legend has it that during the King's stay at a Dominican chaper house in Perth, a group of men led by Sir Robert Graham came to the door searching for the King in order to kill him and Katherine tried to save his life. As the story goes, the King's back-stabbing Chamberlain, Robert Stewart, Master of Atholl, had removed the bolt from the door of the room in which the King and his Queen were staying. When the King heard them coming, he fled into a sewer tunnel as the Queen and her ladies quickly replaced the floorboards to hide his location. Katherine sprang to the door and placed her arm through the iron staples to bar the assassins entrance. However, they forced the door open anyway, breaking Katherine's arm, then found the King in hiding and killed him. From that point on, Katherine took the surname of "Barlass". The idiomatic phrase "Katy, bar the door" (a warning of impending doom, or big trouble) surely has its origins in the story of Katherine Douglas. Henceforth, she was known as "Katy" Barlass "the lass that barred the door". My guess is all this is true. The Scots used the Katherine Douglas story over the years as a reference to "impending doom" and shortened it to "Katy bar the door" as they incorporated the phrase into their vernacular in the centuries to come in the emerging Southern region of the United States of America. In Week 5 of the BDFL, in a so-called "neutral site" game in Katy, Texas, the Sloth Monsters couldn't "bar the door" fast enough as the designated home team, the Duncanville Armadillos rolled to vict'ry over the Legend of Shades Creek (57-35) in another big Texas-sized win this weekend.

I'm Shipping Up To Boston by the Dropkick Murphys (2005)

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