What Is The Origin Of (173)?…
The whole shebang
Often in these etymological excursions I find that a word just seems to spring up into common usage, seemingly from nowhere, and there is little in the way of consensus as to where it came from. One such example is the noun shebang which is used in everyday speech today accompanied by whole and means the whole thing or all of it. But what is a shebang?
The word first appeared in print in America in the 1860s and already had assumed two slightly separate connotations. The poet Walt Whitman, writing in his Journal entry for the period 23rd to 31st December 1862 and describing the appalling conditions of the survivors of the battle of Fredericksburg, described “their shebang enclosures of bushes.” Given their parlous state, these shelters could have only been temporary shelters from the elements.
Contemporaneously, the Annual Report of the US Department of Justice for 1862, noted near a particular reservation; “an inn or shebang is established, ostensibly for the entertainment of travellers, but almost universally used as a den for supplying liquor to Indians.” The link to an establishment serving alcohol has suggested to many that its origin is to be found in the Irish noun shebeen which was used to describe an unlicensed and often disreputable drinking den, often run by women. The Irish word sibin meant illicit whiskey and in turn came from seibe which meant a mugful. That there were many migrants from Ireland flooding into the States around that time is indisputable and about the only things they had to bring with them was their language and traditions.
But almost at the same time the word had taken a broader meaning as shown by Samuel Bowles’ helpful definition in Across the Continent, published in 1865. Shebang is described as being “any kind of an establishment, store, house, shop [or] shanty.” These were more substantial structures than the bivouacs of the survivors of Civil War battles but only just and the word was probably used to describe any mean or rough and ready building. This meaning is not at odds with the drinking shack – it just has a broader connotation. As the Marysville Tribune of November 1869 revealed in its list of The Idioms of Our New West, published in March 1869. “shebang is applied to any sort of house or office.”
By the time Mark Twain got to use it in Roughing It, published in 1872, its meaning had changed once again, this time to describe a vehicle. “You’re welcome to ride here as long as you please, but this shebang’s chartered..” This vehicular sense has led some to consider it as a variant or corruption of char-a-bancs, the French term used to describe a vehicle with benches as seats which was Anglicised by deleting the hyphens. I don’t find this convincing as the two words are quite dissimilar and, anyway, we need only consider it to be another example of the speed at which shebang, once had it had been let loose into the world, accumulated meanings.
That this must be the case is illustrated by its usage in the Sedalia Daily Democrat in June 1872; “Well, the Democracy can flax – this meant to beat up – the whole shebang, and we hope to see our party united.” This is the first recorded usage of the whole shebang and it seems to have its modern sense of the whole thing. The phrase came into its own from the 1920s but it is remarkable to see how its meaning changed so dramatically in the course of ten years. And for what it is worth, I think it owes its origin to shebeen.
