Words and Stuff
Most of us have turned our backs on the sea. Our coastal towns are depressed. We have sold our fishing quotas to the Spanish. We take our holidays by air, seldom sing Heart of Oak and never dance a hornpipe. The navy could steam past Spithead in 30 seconds. Smokers no longer think it’s time for a Capstan and seldom does Senior Service satisfy. Yet take a look at our vocabulary and see how it is steeped in the briny. You can almost smell the salt.
The nautical origins of many terms are obvious. ‘Adrift’, ‘awash’, ‘bilge’, ‘broad in the beam’, ‘cut of his jib’ and ‘dead in the water’ would be just some of the first entries in an ABC. Farther down the list would be words that have acquired new meanings. ‘Jetsam’ once meant ‘goods thrown overboard to lighten a ship in distress’, with no reference to whether they sank or floated. To differentiate it from flotsam, lawyers then changed the agents from the sailors to the waves, making jetsam stuff ‘cast ashore by the sea’. ‘Groundswell’ once described a ‘swell not caused by the wind prevailing at the time’ but is now more often used to mean a ‘movement of political opinion whose size is evident but cause unknown’.
Many more such terms come to us from sailors, even though they had pre-naval beginnings. ‘Fag end’ was once the last or coarser part of a piece of cloth, then the untwisted end of a rope, and then a cigarette butt. ‘Hove’ once meant ‘hover’ but was later used by sailors to mean ‘come or go floating or soaring’. Two old words, ‘under’ and ‘way’, were put together by seamen to mean ‘start moving through the water’, and thence ‘get going’ more generally.
Other familiar words betray little of their jack-speak origins: ‘aback’ (a ship taken aback cannot move forward because of the wind blowing against her); ‘by and large’ (to sail by and large is to sail as close to the wind as possible, and even against it); ‘chock-a-block’ (which occurs when one block, through which a rope passes, is jammed against another, bringing a ship’s pulley system to a stop); and ‘cracking on’ (which means to ‘set more sail’).
These are not modern terms. They date from the days of sail. So, in fact, do most nautical expressions.
Take ‘nipper’. This was the term given to small boys who, when ships tied up, were sent down a thick cable to bind, or nip, a harder rope against the cable to prevent it chafing against the buoy or anchor. ‘Son of a gun’ also goes back a long way, back indeed to the days when sailors in harbour were often denied shore leave in case they deserted. That meant their women sometimes had to give birth on board. The only privacy then afforded to them was provided by some canvas hung between two guns – hence the expression.
It is often said that the injunction to ‘show a leg’, ie, to get moving, dates from the days when women were allowed to share a hammock with a sailor on board ship. When the crew were roused in the morning, a plainly female leg stuck out from beneath a blanket was enough to establish that the occupant didn’t need to get up. This is apparently rubbish: the phrase meant simply ‘wake up’. Another improbable explanation concerns the phrase ‘cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey’. This, some say, derives from iron cannon balls being stacked in tiers on triangular brass trays known as monkeys. In cold weather, the brass contracted more than the iron, leading to some balls rolling off. More bunkum, according to the author of The Phrase Finder online: the temperature would have had to drop by about 100 Centigrade degrees to bring about a relative shrinkage of even one millimetre.
Plain sailing? Or all at sea? Tell it to the marines.