D – In Deep Water (Out of your Depth), Dead in the water, Doozy!

There are many phrases used by sailors to describe the position of ships that also, often denote relative degrees of safety or jeopardy and In Deep Water is one of them. Given that the most dangerous things that can happen to a ship are those that happen close to the shore (land) you might imagine that In Deep Water might be a safe place to be but this expression means that, in the event of the ship sinking, there is no possibility of salvaging anything. After all, in extremis, one option to save the ship, or at least its crew and perhaps cargo, would be to run the ship aground or “beach” it, but if you are in deep water off, say, a rocky cliff, then beaching is not an option…. Other positional terms include In Deep Water has changed its meaning to be almost synonymous with Out of Your Depth,(when you are swimming and can no longer touch the bottom and thus stand)but “in deep water” still somehow retains the menace of destruction eg. “The boss wants to see you – you’re in deep water!”

Which segues nicely into “Dead in the Water” – a phrase that refers not to dead people but dead ships. Certainly, in a naval ship was dead in the water it would mean that it’s masts and spars and very likely it’s steering had been shot to pieces by cannon fire and that the ship cannot move with the wind and thus cannot manoeuvre – it is a sitting duck and any crew still standing are likewise vulnerable. However dead in the water could be applied to a ship which is completely becalmed but we shall return to that with the letter “I”.

A word I used in a reply to somebody made the post today because I had no idea where it originates – Doozy. I first encountered it in a short story by Kurt Vonnegut Junior, one of my favourite writers and it seems that Doozy is an American term. In the story, the government has determined that intelligence must be equal amongst all men – and since the lowest levels cannot be raised easily, those with high IQs must be brought down a peg or two (another one I will have to look up!) and so the husband of an unremarkable wife, intelligence wise, receives regular electric shocks to the brain, eliciting the sympathetic response from his wife “You poor love – I can tell that one was a doozy!” The word stuck in my brain and I began to use it, however, because of the context of the story, I assumed it to refer to very bad things. In fact, it means “The very best of its kind” whether that thing is good or bad. This site suggests the meaning is a corruption of Daisy which was used especially in the late 1800s as a slang term for someone or something considered the best. I’ll buy that…

There are no Cant languages beginning with “D” “in the Wikipedia article.