THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605160218
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 31 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ronald L. Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
The salty sayings of seamen over the centuries have been adopted by the dozens by folks who have never seen the sea.
As a sailor of small boats, I've long marveled at how often the jargon once understood only by sailors has made its way into the mainstream of our everyday conversations.
The realization of how vivid and perfect are the sayings given birth on the oceans of the world was brought home to me years ago, when I helped sail a 75-year-old wooden skipjack from Baltimore to Norfolk.
The classic Chesapeake Bay fishing boat had a boom - the wooden pole on the bottom of the mainsail - that was as round as my belly and probably 50 feet long. Normally the boom rode a couple of feet above our heads, out of harm's way.
But a loose cannon in the crew untied the wrong line and hundreds of pounds of boom dropped with a sickening thud on the deck, between two of us.
``Shiver my timbers!'' I shouted, suddenly realizing exactly what was in store if somebody threatened to lower the boom on me.
The shivering timbers comment first was cried by a sailor on a old ship that smashed into a rock with such force that the wooden hull quivered.
A loose cannon, by the way, comes from a seaman's description of a howitzer that had been ripped from its bonds on the teetering deck of a wooden warship. Not a pretty sight.
I've always figured I faced plain sailing in defining those sayings until I came across a new book, ``When a Loose Cannon Flogs a Dead Horse There's the Devil to Pay.''
And to make sure that I'm not sailing under false colors - as did pirates until they showed their true colors just before attacking - let me give you the scuttlebutt about the book:
It lists more than 250 sea-faring words or sayings or slogans, and at $$9.95 in soft-cover it is must reading for anybody who goes down to the sea in ships or loves the language.
The book is by Olivia A. Isil, a Roanoke Island historian who learned how seamen talk from her father, a World War II diver, and three seagoing uncles.
Some of their sayings were rather salty, and Isil writes that when she was a child she was told by her mother not to repeat anything she heard from her uncles.
But she stored away their words, and in the 134-page book just out she tells us how those sayings worked their way into everyday conversations.
One of my favorites is how we came to describe a drunk as being ``three sheets to the wind.'' On a sailboat, a sheet is the line used to control a sail, and when they get away in the wind the ship wallows out of control.
You don't have to be a sailor to recognize a lot of the terms and realize how ingrained they are in our language.
``Above board,'' now used to mean fair and honest, comes from staying in plain view on the deck to do business, Isil says. ``Batten down the hatches,'' we say when trouble approaches, while at sea the old salts used that as the command to put thin strips of wood over canvas to cover the openings in the deck when storms neared.
``Bootleg' was the term given to the practice by American sailors of hiding contraband in the tops of their boots.
When we chat idly we ``chew the fat,'' a comment coined by our seagoing ancestors while they were gnawing the daily ration of pork.
``Shake a leg'' has an interesting origin, and so do ``slush fund'' and ``son of a gun.''
Sailors reading the book will think they've dropped hook at ``Fiddler's Green.''
But if you think you know all the ropes, Olivia Isil will take the wind right out of your sails. by CNB