Vocabulary derived from sailing

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Since a few months ago and the last column on the ancestry of one bunch of words, I’ve run across a few more.

A lot of our vocabulary derives from the days of sailing ships, like this one: “Making ends meet.” This refers nowadays of course to not only our own personal and household budgets, where the money arriving is in constant threat of not matching the money leaving, but of the national treasury as well, where the national debt is now many, many thousands of dollars for every man, woman and child in the USA.

Canvas sails on sailing ships were raised and lowered separately, as more or less sail was needed. Rigging involved hundreds of ropes, some of which were easy to repair, and some of which involved unthreading rows of eyes through which the rope fastened the sail to a spar. When these multiple-threaded ropes broke, most ship’s masters, who were in charge of them, preferred to replace them.

Owners however were stingy, and had a policy of pulling the broken ends together and splicing them, a repair which could only be done once. After that, the sail would not stretch anymore, and ends would not meet. Even though sailing ships are long gone, they remain with us in what became a household term.

So does the term “at loose ends,” which referred to ropes whose ends weren’t braided tight, and often then got tangled with other loose ends.

Another sailing term — which I’ve never been able to keep straight — refers to the right and left side of a boat, starboard, and port. Back we go to the 1100’s, when Saxon sailing ships used a rudder that swung off the right hand side of the ship, rather than directly centered in the rear of the boat. They called this rudder the “steerboard.”

So far, so good. What then about port? Why call the left side the port side? Because when the ship docked, it could not do so on the “steerboard” or as it became known, the “starboard” side, because that would bust it, up against the dock, or “port.”

So the side opposite the starboard became quite simply the port side.

There is another interesting term which I’ve used before, which is “posh.” When steam became the manner in which ships were powered, England was at the height of its colonial power, and one of those colonies was India, to which many English folks traveled by boat.

There was no air conditioning available in those ships, so the very best rooms were those to the side of the ship which got the wind, and were hence cooler. Those rooms were on the port side going to India, and on the starboard side coming back. Such rooms cost a lot more, and became abbreviated as P.O.S.H., which stood for port outbound, starboard homeward. Folks even today who are accustomed to traveling in the posh front of the airplane rarely have to worry about making ends meet.

They also rarely have to worry about being “in the dog house.” Although I always thought this term literally meant sleeping with the dog outside, it turns out that it in fact comes from the days of sailing ships and the slave trade. This evil business of sailing with a ship full of people to be sold as slaves was dangerous, because on more than one occasion, prisoners slipped their chains and killed the crew. Many sailors therefore slept on deck, after locking and chaining the hatch covers, thus preventing any escapes.

They had to have someplace on board to sleep, away from the elements, and there were a lot of sailors, so these places couldn’t be very big. You guessed it. They were on deck, and called doghouses.

I remember one of my teenage daughters replying, when asked what she and her cohorts were up to with the car the previous night: “Oh, we just cruised up and down main street.”

Beginning in the 17th century, pirates in sailing ships zigzagged back and forth across the shipping lanes, waiting for fresh prey to present itself. This zigzag movement came to be called “kruisen,” the Dutch word for “cross.” I suppose once these folks got back to shore, and were asked what they were doing, they replied: “Oh, just kruisen.” Kruisen became shortened by the English to “cruise.” From there, it was an easy step to say that one had just taken an ocean cruise.

And that’s pretty much what you have just done, taken a “word” cruise.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.