T – Three Sheets to the Wind, Truffle out, Tarnation, Tits up – break a leg. On Tenterhooks…

Another sailing term, but this time to do with small boat sailing (although big sailing ships might well have sailed tenders). The sheets mean the ropes which are attached to the sails, so in a sailing dinghy that means two ropes, one each port and starboard and the same for the mainsail. Now you want to coil up the sheets which are not actually in use at any moment so that they don’t get tangled up with anything and are ready for the next time you change course and swap the sails from one side to the other. So if you are “Three Sheets to the Wind”, then you are hardly in control of your sailing craft – sheets blowing free bar one only a drunken sailor would be so sloppy – so three sheets to the wind means drunk, out of control…

Truffle Out refers to the way truffles – the underground fruiting bodies of the truffle fungus – are located by either a Truffle Hound or perhaps a Truffle Pig – animals which are trained to locate these expensive delicacies – of course, they are rewarded with a small portion of their finds to keep them keen… In current usage, it reflects a slightly gentle, indulgent form of searching for something, not the logic of Sherlock Holmes or the sharp no-nonsense of Philip Marlowe but possibly Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot…

Tarnation is the outlier of a group of religious swear words that we shall return to in “Z” but here we have, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “1784, American English alteration of darnation (itself a euphemism for damnation), influenced by tarnal (1790), a mild profanity, clipped from the phrase by the Eternal (God)” Etymology is a fancy word for what this blog has been attempting to do this year – to truffle out the meaning and origin of words and phrases…

“Tits up!” is a delightful phrase which my partner and I grew to love from binge-watching “The Marvellous Mrs Maisel” a fictional, Jewish, New York, wise-cracking comedienne. She might have been fictional but several of the characters in the drama were real – Lenny Bruce for one and Miriam Maisel’s agent Susie Myerson, who specialised in female clients and always sent Miriam onstage with a robust admonition of “Tits up!” This is used as an expression for things going wrong and taps into the superstitious world of the stage in which “Break a leg!” serves the same purpose – the ritual wishing of the worst that might happen to someone wards off the possibility of it actually happening. There was me thinking for years that if you slipped backwards on a banana skin – a Pratfall – you would land tits up…

On Tenterhooks refers to the hooks that line the sides of a tenter, or frame for stretching fabric. Wet fabric is stretched on the tenter and secured by the hooks with even tension and hopefully, all wrinkles will be stretched flat as the fabric dries. Of course, that means waiting to see whether you have pulled the fabric taut enough to get rid of the wrinkles, else you have to start again and that is how it has come to mean waiting on some desired outcome with trepidation. I always thought the expression was referring to the meat hooks on which gangsters like to hang those from whom they are trying to extract information (surely a perilous position in which to wonder about the outcome) – turns out those are just meat hooks…

The Cant languages beginning with T from the Wikipedia article are:

• Thieves’ cant (or peddler’s French, or St Giles’ Greek), from the United Kingdom
• Tōgo, from Japan (a back slang)
• Totoiana, from Romania
• Tsotsitaal, from South Africa
• Tutnese, from the United States