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When someone speaks of "holding down the fort," it basically means keeping an eye on things temporarily while the person in charge is away. The expression seems rather nonsensical, though; a fort is a large, solid building constructed as a stronghold. A person in an actual fort might need to hold up the fort (or its walls) if it came under attack, but you don't hold down an inanimate object that is too heavy for the wind to blow away. So where does the term originate?

Mason Wheeler
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    In Britain we hold the fort. I don't know where you have heard anything about holding down the fort. – WS2 Jun 19 '15 at 20:24
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    @WS2 That is the standard expression in AmE. I have heard Brits say it, too, though perhaps their use of down in this idiom is due to American influence. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 20:25
  • @JanusBahsJacquet - I disagree. If anyone says "hold down" they're screwing up the verb use in a way similar to "tow the line." – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 20:27
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    @stevesliva No, they’re not. Hold down the fort may be a more recent version of the expression, but it is completely different from tow the line, which is a purely orthography-based eggcorn. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 20:34
  • @JanusBahsJacquet - I still think your insistence that hold down can rightfully mean "manage," as a way the idiom more logically wandered away from its military origins is worth an answer. All three currently say it's more or less an inexplicable change. (And it still is inexplicable to me, since both the noun and the verb are military terms.) – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 22:23
  • @stevesliva I think I'll write up an answer tomorrow. Too late and too tired right now. :-) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 22:23
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    Clearly, holding down the fort is the only way to prevent the enemy from razing it. – hatchet - done with SOverflow Jun 19 '15 at 23:49
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    Check out Mitchell soapbox on YouTube. Very nice articulate rant. Wish I had seen this question earlier. – Mari-Lou A Jun 20 '15 at 11:39
  • Good one! @Mari-Lou –  Jun 20 '15 at 21:38

3 Answers3

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Hold the fort (British, American & Australian) also hold down the fort (American):

  • to be left in charge of a situation or place while someone is away. Someone had to stay at home and hold the fort while my mother was out.

(Cambridge Idiom Dictionary)

According to the Phrase Finder:

The correct phrase is "hold the fort" - there's no "down".

  • Since the Middle Ages "hold" in a military context has meant, "to keep forcibly against an adversary; defend; occupy". If the commander of a fort decided to take some of his forces to make a foray against the enemy, he would always have to leave some of his men in charge of a reliable officer to hold the fort against any possible attack while they were away. (VSD)

  • "Hold down the fort" is a variation . The original use of the phrase "hold the fort" was a military order wired by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 to Gen. John M. Corse at Allatoona during the Civil War. "Records show that the actual words had been 'Hold out, relief is coming,' but 'fort' is what caught on and was further popularized when it was made the refrain of a gospel song by Philip Paul Bliss." From "Facts on File Dictionary of Cliches," second edition, edited by Christine Ammer, Checkmark Books, New York, 2006. Page 202.

  • I accept that this incident is what popularised the phrase, but it can't possibly have been the original use! English-speaking people have been holding forts, and ordering other people to hold forts, for close on a millennium. (VSD)

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Using the google on books finds a "down" usage from 1951. It took Wilson Follett and Jacques Barzun fifteen years to contemne this phrase in their *Modern American Usage: A Guide" in 1966, saying "Many unschooled in the lore of battle hold an odd idea of forts. For more than a century, the idiom, commonly figurative, has been to hold the fort -- that is, to retain possession of a place against all threat of contention.... Those who have taken to saying hold down the fort would never say hold down an odd idea of forts. Which seems to miss the point, since holding an idea differs significantly from holding a fort.

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang notes the use, dating from the late 19th Century, of "hold down," meaning to occupy a place, and A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English records the use from the same period with land claims. And no one finds strange the locution "hold down a job." Using "down" may be a corruption of the original, but I don't see how it's based on a mishearing that would make it an eggcorn.

deadrat
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    Searching Google books, there is a use of the term from 1904, and becomes more commonly found by the 1930's. – hatchet - done with SOverflow Jun 19 '15 at 23:26
  • I agree the original should be 'hold the fort' and 'hold down…' looks like an aberration.

    Is it too much to speculate that 'hold down…' could have come from a land-lubbers variation on something like 'make all secure and batten down the hatches!" where the security is against the weather, not a human enemy?

     – Robbie Goodwin Apr 28 '17 at 08:42
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It's "hold the fort," which makes sense militarily.

Keep possession of (something), typically in the face of a challenge or attack: the rebels held the town for many weeks

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/hold

Adding down to the idiom "hold the fort" is an example of an eggcorn.

a word or phrase that is a seemingly logical alteration of another word or phrase that sounds similar and has been misheard or misinterpreted, as 'old wise tale' for 'old wives' tale'.

So if "down" is there in your experience of common usage, it's just a misinterpretation of the original military idiom, or a misunderstanding of how to use the verb hold in this sense, though it's not necessarily wrong.

stevesliva
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    Fair enough, except that's not the phrase I'm asking about. – Mason Wheeler Jun 19 '15 at 20:27
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    The question is where the down came from in the version “hold down the ford”, and how it makes sense logically. Answering that “hold the ford” makes sense isn't really answering the question; it's just ignoring the bit that makes the question an actual question. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 20:27
  • If you were asking about "tow the line," I'd assume you wanted to know about the same exact idiom and its derivation from not nonsensical syntax. – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 20:28
  • @MasonWheeler -- if you're insistent that "down" must be there, you have an eggcorn. So I added that as an answer. – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 20:31
  • @JanusBahsJacquet This chap is American and seems to think hold the fort is the usual metaphor. So who is influencing him? – WS2 Jun 19 '15 at 20:32
  • I may be from a region where the idiom hasn't been eggcorned. – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 20:34
  • That is not what an eggcorn is. Tow/toe is an eggcorn, as is acorn/eggcorn. There is nothing in “hold the fort” that can be misheard or misinterpreted as ‘down’. It is simply an alternative version of the expression. @WS2 “The standard expression” was too strongly worded: “a common version” would have been more accurate. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 20:36
  • Also, “hold down the fort” isn’t really a misunderstanding of how to use the verb hold in the military sense: rather, it’s a perfectly logical (though somewhat extended) use of the phrasal verb hold down, meaning “to continue to occupy (a place or post) or succeed in discharging the duties of (one's employment)” (OED). Just a substitution of a different verb (though one that happens to have the same actual verb in it). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 20:40
  • @JanusBahsJacquet The question seems to find it illogical. I agree with that sentiment, in that it doesn't make sense to say "down." Idioms can be nonsensical, and it this one evolves to have "down" in it, it's because it's getting eggcorned because people are misinterpreting the phrase without its original context. – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 20:41
  • @stevesliva The question finds it illogical because it's based on the wrong sense of hold down, physically holding something down to the ground, not the one relevant here that deals with continuing occupation or ownership of a place. If you can hold down a ranch (one of the literary examples in the OED entry for hold down), why not a fort? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 20:49
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    And even if it is due to misinterpretation (I'm not so sure it is), that still doesn't make it an eggcorn. An eggcorn is based in phonetic similarity: it is hearing a word and incorrectly understanding it as a different, homophonous (or almost homophonous) word, like toe/tow, acorn/eggcorn, chock/chalk, etc. Down is not homophonous with [ ] (i.e., nothing). If there had been a variant “hole down the fort”, that would have been an eggcorn (like “no holes barred”), but that's not what's going on here at all. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 20:55
  • Hold down means don't lose it; it may have started with sheaves in the wind or bags stacked on a cart, but it seems metaphorical rather than an eggcorn. I might ask an employee to hold things down at the office while I'm at the meeting meaning make sure everything is under control in the same way. – choster Jun 19 '15 at 20:58
  • You should probably make your own answer at this point. "Hold down" in the sense "manage" is an interesting way of interpreting it. I've always thought of it as a military idiom. Because it is. But the other sense helps explain the evolution. – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 20:58
  • Also, I'm not sure eggcorns have to be homophones. By "almost homophonous" you perhaps mean a homophone to someone with a dialect or accent that makes it more difficult to understand the original phrase, which sort of leads me back to calling this an eggcorn. Absent knowledge of the military phraseology, certain Americans mutated the original idiom. – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 21:09
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Using her two powerful legs she danced the flamingo – WS2 Jun 19 '15 at 21:33
  • @stevesliva By “almost homophones” I mean that they have to sound similar enough that they can be confused in context. For example, wise and wives are very close to each other, but not quite homophonous; but they're close enough that in context, the /v/ is easily lost, which is the source of old wise tale. Same goes for holes/holds, where the /d/ easily all but disappears. As a kid, I thought Steven Tyler sang “do just like a lady”—that's an eggcorn. The whole point of an eggcorn is that it's a mishearing. That's part and parcel of its very definition. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 21:54
  • (Actually, my Aerosmith gaffe is probably more of a mondegreen, since it's a sentence and song lyrics; but the mechanism is the same.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 19 '15 at 21:57
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Yeah, you're right. I knew those are the prototypical eggcorns, as is the term itself (nee acorn), but stupidly let myself try to stretch the definition. I struck it, so that this an a bunch of other noise I created doesn't look weird. – stevesliva Jun 19 '15 at 22:15
  • If the use of down is a wandering from military origins, it's interesting that the term 'holding down the fort' is found in a U.S. Marines Recruiter's bulletin from 1916 (although it's not being used in a strictly military sense). – hatchet - done with SOverflow Jun 19 '15 at 23:38