B – The Bitter End, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Brass monkeys, Butcher’s Bill, – Sailors’ terms

Today we come, for the first but by no means the only time, to sailors’ jargon – in particular, sailors from the days of the great wooden sailing ships of both the (English) Royal Navy and what we would now term the Merchant Navy. Sailors’ lives are still lived apart from their families, from “landsmen” even from sailors from other ships, most of the time – so as a profession and even as individual ship’s crews, sailors develop their own special lexicon of words and phrases. This is not, I think, to keep their communications secret as is the case with say, Cockney rhyming slang – rather it is just a collection of job-related jargon  – yet some of these phrases have gained wider parlance although their original meaning may have been lost or obscured in the process. Some sailor’s phrases are obvious enough in meaning “washed up” for example, but others need a bit of explanation such as the following…

“The Bitter End” – this has assumed the meaning “when you get to the very end of a situation – the “end of the road” but it is in fact, a misquotation of the seaman’s phrase “having reached the biter end”. We are familiar with the sight of the capstan – a massive winch radiating spokes pushed on by sweating sailors and used to haul up the ship’s anchor. However, the thickness of the anchor rope (hawse) and its wet and even slimy condition, would not have made it possible to wrap it around a capstan, Instead, a thinner rope went around the capstan and was attached to the anchor rope where it came aboard by a sharp hook called a ”biter”, that dug into the anchor rope and pulled it aboard. This thinner rope was only as long as the distance from the capstan to the “hawse hole” and so when the “biter” got near to the capstan, the hawse had to be secured momentarily, and the “biter” repositioned at the hawse hole again, ready to pull in the next section of the hawse. This moment was known as “reaching the biter end”, and whilst the sense of the expression was understood very appropriately by non-sailors, the real meaning together with the biter (as opposed to bitter) was lost.

That the expression should have gained such wide traction, is a testament to the evocative idea of reaching, with bitterness, the end. Another expression which has travelled far beyond its (non-naval) origins, is:-

“Back to Square One” which expression I have heard even in non-English parlance – though quoted in English, which is a surefire sign that no better expression exists in that language*. Its origin dates back to the early days of Sports coverage on the BBC Home Service (now BBC Radio 4). Commentators could not figure out how to describe the movement and position of the ball action on the football field and so the Radio Times (a magazine of programme listings) published a diagram of a football pitch with all the lines and markings and numbering the important areas of the pitch. The commentators soon abandoned this cumbersome descriptive system and realised that describing the action, the possession, the player names, the direction of travel and the kicks and tackles, was all that was required for listeners who could fill the rest in with their imagination. Brief as the usage of “Back to Square One” was, historically, it gained widespread and even international usage to mean “Back to the Beginning”. We will discover I coming posts that many phrases have disputed origins and an alternative suggestion for “back to square one” is the game of Snakes and Ladders, but only one snake can take you back to square one and so it is not a universal occurrence during the game and I for one side with the football commentary explanation!

The French, whose language was once the official language of International Diplomacy, have never forgiven the English language for having usurped its place and one expression of this anger, is the attempt to root out “Franglais” words – English words that have been adopted by the French for want of a better native word, or vice versa. I would suggest that this rigidity is the very reason for the success of the English language because despite its occasionally quirky pronunciation issues, it is easy to learn since you can string words together in any order (no waiting for the verbs at the end of the sentence) and without having to gender them and yet be understood. As well, English happily admits Franglais or any other foreign words for which it has no equivalent –  such as Picnic (from the French – Pique-nique) to enlarge its diversity! Examples of English to French Franglais include blazer, brunch, burger, blog and brainstorming – and that’s just the B’s! Ironically, the attempt by the Académie Française, to restrict the entry of English words, is the very reason why they enter common usage in French-speaking countries (Quebec is equally disdainful of Franglais) – if a language is set in aspic, not allowed to grow and meet the challenges of new objects and ideas, what are people to do?

“Between a Rock and a Hard Place…” – this is not hard to understand once you realise that it is a sailor’s term – a rock is a rock and the “hard place” means the “shore”, a “lee shore” is a shore that a ship is being blown towards, and since it is impossible for a sailing ship to sail directly into the wind but only diagonally towards it – so if your ability to sail diagonally towards the wind and away from a lee shore, is compromised by a rock to windward and you are in a very dangerous position…

“Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – you may be beginning to see the “lost in translation” aspect of sayings overheard from sailors by landsmen in which case, you will not be surprised to learn that this expression has nothing to do with statues of simians cast in brass losing their genitalia!

A “monkey” on a wooden ship, especially a warship, was a (usually) wooden tray with rounded depressions in which cannon balls were stacked in preparation for the battle – the last thing you wanted was heavy cannon balls rolling around the deck of a pitching deck – let alone a “loose cannon” – so cannons were secured (against recoil on firing) by strong ropes and cannon balls were kept on a monkey. I said that monkeys were usually made of wood, but admirals or very lucky captains, who had made a lot of money from their share of “prizes” (captured ships, evaluated and paid for by the Navy) – were allowed to prettify their ships with gold leaf, dress their crews in custom, fancy uniforms, and purchase brass monkeys rather than the standard issue wooden ones. Now here’s the thing, a monkey was carefully designed so that you could pile the cannon balls up in a pyramid to maximise your supply of cannon balls in as small a space as possible but the thermal coefficient of expansion of brass (the monkey) and iron (the cannon balls) is different – the brass monkey shrinks more than iron in very cold conditions. Now, the carefully spaced second and subsequent layers of the pyramid are too big for their positions and can roll off the monkey hence “Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – Simples! Not!

Lastly, we come to a term probably used by Soldiers as well as military Sailors – “The Butcher’s Bill” – which sad term represents the reckoning of dead and wounded following a battle.

I hope you have enjoyed the elucidation of these sailor’s terms and rest assured there will be more to come – but for now, that’s the B’s done!