“Hell or High Water” Contracts

Certainly all Lessors would like their contracts paid on time “come hell or high water.” Until the NorVergence matter there was a common believe that such contracts existed. It is really another myth that repeated so often becomes “fact” to those who hear it, just as the expression itself has evolved in the English language.

Actually the term itself comes from the 17 th century expression of “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” according to the “Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins” by Robert Hendrickson, published by Facts on File.

“The Devil didn't inspire this old saying, as many people believe. It is thought to be a nautical expression, as its earliest recorded use in 1621 indicates, the “devil” in it referring not to Satan but to a seam between planks in a wooden ship's deck, specifically the long seam nearest to either side of a shop. This seam was “the devil to get at,” and any sailor caulking it in a heavy sea risked failing overboard. The seam that ran around a ship's hull at the waterline, another one difficult and dangerous to get at, was also called ‘the devil,' and those two devils inspired the memorable alliterative phrase 'between the devil and the deep blue sea'---someone caught on the horns of a dilemma, caught between difficulties that are equally dangerous. Similarly, 'the devil to pay' refers to ‘paying'---waterproofing with pitch---the devil on a ship. Pay here comes from the Latin picare, for the process and the original phrase was ‘the devil to pay and no hot pitch.'

“ ‘Come hell or high water:' the ancestor of this common expression is apparently ‘Between the devil and the deep blue sea.' Between hell and high water seems to have been a 20 th -century variation on (or deviation from) the earlier phrase. Then the variation took on a life of its own in the expression ‘come hell or high water,' meaning ‘no matter what,' as ‘Come hell or high water, I'll finish it.'”

And that is exactly what it is, an expression. Not law.