Verbiage of the Sea

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 40, 10 May 1927, Page 3

Verbiage of the Sea

Sailor Terms That Have Come Ashore

A dealer remarked sadly to me that in a few more years nearly all relics of the good old days of a seafaring nation will have gone, and that it will be a great pity. “They will be swamped and lost,” he said. I don’t think he need worry himself about that (writes H. M. Tomlinson in “T.P.’s Weekly.”) Those models, of course, will become rarer. The queer coloured glass rollers, or lucktokens, or fetishes—the dealer had several of them for sale —which at one time were common on nails over the fire-places of those homes from which sailors had gone voyaging—will become as scarce as pieces of eight. Yet we shall continue to use, without knowing whence they came, the ship words and phrases natural to those sailors and indeed to their very ancient world of deep-waters; words and phrases which, if examined, do not smell of the land. Though like the dealer, who used the term “swamped” without knowing that it was much more ancient of the sea than his precious relics, we are usually unaware that we are using sailor language; we are apt to suppose that polite people never by any chance use such language. Plain and Honest Language To be taken aback, as I was when I heard the price of the model, is what used to happen to a ship when brought to by an unexpected change of wind or the incompetence of the man at the wheel. The English tongue is so free with such expressive words that we must use them. Many people, unluckily, may continue to be taken aback long after the chance winds will find no square sails to blow back upon the masts of ships. We say a man or a thing, for example, is “above board”; over the deck, that is, in plain and honest view to all hands, if they choose to look that way. And speaking of board ...

Well, if we do, we shall take soundings in a national past where the bottom is really deep, for we brought that word “board” with us when we came to the island which, in much later times, was called England. According to Skeat, it is the same word in Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Irish, Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish; “bord.” It was a plank, and so was also the side of a ship; and thus we get starboard (that is steer, and board, the plank of the ship to which was lashed the directing paddle). Also, incidentally, “to board,” or to eat at the plank or table; or again, to go into a ship. When, for example, we declare, owing to a great surprise, that we were “brought up with a round turn,” then we were “belayed,” just as when a turn of a running rope is thrown round a fixture, so that the movement is stopped because the rope is made “fast.” For oddly enough, “fast” originally did not mean what was quick, but that something was firm in its place. We see that even there the sailor retains a purity of meaning which politer folk have lost. So in the case of the word “bend.” We mean by that to make crooked or to curve. But its proper meaning is “to bind.” You bend one rope to another, or you make fast, or bend, a sail to a yard. Our trivial modern meaning perhaps derives anciently from the act of stringing a bow. As Admiral Smyth tells us in his “Sailor’s Word Book,” “it is indeed remarkable how largely the foundation of the English language has been preserved by means of sailors.” Sailors Aid Politicians If you want to know what ready aid sailors lend to modern politicians, when those busy and hurried men have no time to shape their own figures of speech, .turn to Hansard. Read how one political quick-change artist will taunt another with having “ratted”; we know how rats behave when a ship is doomed. Or that a measure, because it might have done some good, has been jettisoned, or thrown overboard; or that something or other has taken the wind out of the sails of somebody; or that an imitative member was merely following in the wake of a greater person; or that a question was being tided over; or that another artful member was trimming to the breeze; as sails are trimmed to keep them full, when the breeze shifts its direction. You will, if you watch, find your newspaper full of such terms, though the writers might not know a stem from a stern-post. It is all one. Our language is brackish. And what would you expect when we had brought to us “anchor” from the Mediterranean (a very ancient word) ; “admiral” from the Red Sea., “hammock” from the West Indies, and “junk” from Malaya, and a scatter of other jewels from all the coasts of the world, to enrich our language? Our speech is loaded with words brought from overseas by navigators and traders. Though they are not our oldest words, of course, by a very long way, some of the words which sailors use to-day were brought to this land we call England by the wanderers who first thought that something could be done with its forests and swamps. Where the words originated nobody really knows. We have viewed one of them in “board”; mist is another; and ship from the north, and barque (later) from the south; mast, boat, stream, tide, sail, row (with oars), harbour, fathom, fish, mere, hail, storm, cliff, strand, shower and many more. But apart from those ancient words, there are the phrases, as we have seen, which essentially are for ships only, but which we all use as we take the bus we want when it comes along, without troubling as to what its place of departure may have been. “Halfseas over.” We know what that means: but to a sailor the mid-channel is halfseas—that is, half way across. The Devil on the Margin

“The devil to pay (and no hot pitch.)” The deck seam which margined the water ways was called “the devil” and appears to have been difficult to caulk. “On his beam ends.” “Brought to his bearings.” “Carry on” —to spread all sail, even at all hazards. “Clean off the reel”—when a ship sailed so swiftly that she pulled the line off the log-reel. “Sailing close to the wind.” “Cutting the painter.” To “cut and run” —to cut the cable and escape from a bad anchorage. “Cut of the jib.” “Not a shot in his locker.” But any reader could now go on to fill pages with them. There is one expression about which I should like to hear more. We say, with satisfaction, that something is O.K. From where and what does that come? I have seen many shots at it, but to me they are not good shots. Did it not originally refer to a certain good quality of rum? That it was from Aux Cayes—from a choice locality in the West Indies.