In the Doldrums is not just a positional term for sailors, but a very particular place not just in the Atlantic, but stretching around the world at the Equator – The Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone – ITCZ or “Itch”. If you want to see the technical explanation see this excellent site. It is a region that all sailing ships passing from North to South (or vice versa) on the world’s oceans, could not avoid passing through. The air could be completely devoid of wind or the winds could be light and “flukey” (wandering in all directions) though equally, unexpected storms might release or deposit you in the doldrums. Because of the calm nature of the doldrums (mostly), great mats of Sargassum weed accumulate as an added hazard thereabouts so the doldrums are sometimes referred to as The Sargasso Sea.
Being trapped for long in the doldrums was a ship’s Captains nightmare, let alone ship-owners and cargo-owners and for the crew, being trapped under an equatorial sun with no cooling breeze and the water rations diminishing by the day – well you can scarcely imagine…
Below is a drawing of a ship fortunate to have found a light wind to take it out of the doldrums…
A ship sailing in very light winds from “Sailing Round Cape Horn” by Gunther t. Schultz – an artist’s record of the last days of commercial sailing ships. 1954 – London – Hodder & Stoughton
Idlers are yet another nautical term but with a counterintuitive meaning. Far from being lazy, idlers were those members of a ship’s crew whose work took place during the daytime and so were usually excused from working on the night watch – unless it was an emergency and “All hands on deck!” was called. So carpenters, sailmakers, cooks, and cabin boys were all idlers…
In the Offing – means a ship is within sight of port – many ports have a tower from which approaching ships can be sighted and the relevant people summoned to greet her shortly. A “Widow’s Walk” is an architectural term for a balcony at or above roof level where in the days of sailing ships, wives (sea “widows”), would watch for the return of their spouses – what a sad occupation…
Not a hard one to figure out – if a guest is rapacious enough in their appetite and consumes everything in the pantry, then one is eaten out of the house and home and forced to go out for more supplies – hopefully having evicted the house-guest. H proved a difficult letter to find suitable phrases for, but with this one, we get the chance to consider the many phrases whose origins are ascribed to the great William Shakespeare – this particular phrase comes from Henry IV, Part 2, Act 2 Scene 1. As I said under apple of my eye, another phrase ascribed to the Bard, I cannot but help wondering, sacrilegious as it may be, whether Shakespeare originated all these phrases or was simply the first to commit them to paper. The Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust have no doubts though and have a webpage called Shakespeare’s Phrases which cites the phrase and the play in which it appears – make up your own minds…
Here are a few:-
“The clothes make the man” Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3
“The be all and end all” Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7
“Wild goose chase” Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 4
“Brave New World” The Tempest Act 5, Scene 1.
The last one gives an example of how one phrase has been propagated – Aldous Huxley, surely a man well-educated in the Classics and Shakespeare, used “Brave New World” as the title of one of his own masterpieces which has in turn become a shortcut in any article describing utopian/dystopian paradigms but for all our familiarity with the phrase now, was it in common usage since Shakespeare and before Huxley or only a quote known to the cognoscenti, the literate class? Just as we have already encountered phrases which have multiple theories as to their origins, theories which multiply faster than rabbits in the warren of the World Wide Web (how’s that for a mixed metaphor!) – so with Shakespearean phrases, only by searching all written material and all recorded word, and counting all the occurrences could we truly know the answer…
The Clothes Make the Man – Photo by Taha on Unsplash
Lastly, we have only one “H” Cant language example from Wikipedia‘s excellent article on the subject… Hijra Farsi, from South Asia, used by the hijra and kothi subcultures (traditional indigenous approximate analogues to LGBT subcultures)
Greenlit or giving something the green light, barely scrapes into this theme since you would think that it’s not so hard to figure out – after all the traffic-lighting system has spread even further than the road traffic indicators with which we are all only too familiar. The reason it has made it into the blog is that it is not road, but railway signals that originated the coloured signalling.
Today greenlit has a special resonance with the movie industry since movies have so many hurdles to jump before they are greenlit to go ahead but green-lighting is used for all sorts of projects in many industries.
The coloured lights, at least the red and green, moved over to road traffic lights fairly smoothly, although it took a while for universal agreement on the Amber warning phase. (See here)
Get Someone’s Goat…
Unlike greenlit, the origins of this phrase are not at all obvious! One might imagine from the current usage – To Make Someone Angry- that this refers to the natural consequence of the theft of a goat however the true origin is more bizarre – although it still involves the theft of hapless goats. Goats are said to have a calming effect on horses and race horses are notoriously high-strung, so owners might put a companionable goat in the stall of a racehorse on the night before a race. Naturally, if a rival stole the goat and the horse was consequentially over-frisky, the owner would be very angry…
These are Greek not Spanish olives, taken by myself in 2020
Get There with the Olives…
Sometimes, olives are served at the end of a Spanish meal and so someone who “get’s there with the olives” is arriving very late!
Lastly – the links to Cant “G” languages courtesy of Wikipedia…
Flash in the Pan is another phrase with two possible meanings both of which are plausible and might even have, like branches of evolution, have come about independently – or perhaps one was in use and was adapted to fit the other…
Firstly – the meaning that we have today and which is indisputable – something which begins promisingly but disappointingly, comes to nothing.
The probable, earliest origin of flash in the pan, is from the days of flintlock pistols when both pistols as well as cannons, had a small hollow called the “pan” which was primed with a little gunpowder after the pistol (or cannon) have been loaded. Later cannons had flintlock mechanisms similar to pistols which did away with slow matches in the case of cannons. In the centre of the pan was a tiny hole connecting to the main charge of gunpowder within the weapon. When the gunpowder in the pan ignited successfully, the fire would be forced down through the hole to ignite the main charge and fire the weapon but, necessarily, the hole was tiny or else the main charge could blow up through the hole and fail to expel the ball or cannonball not to mention the risk of injuring the person firing the weapon! So unfortunately, sometimes, the gunpowder might ignite (the flash) but fail to drive the flame down into the weapon to ignite the main charge which might not just be disappointing, but also fatal if you were facing an enemy who was more successfully armed…
So if this expression had already survived the passing of the flintlock, and was a byword for disappointment, then it was perfect to describe the feelings of the gold miner who, upon seeing a flash in his gold pan, was disappointed not to find a piece of gold after all. Perhaps this usage is what tided the expression over from the days of flintlocks through to the present day…
Full of Beans is from the days when horses were to transport, what motor vehicles are today. And like motor vehicles, there were a variety of fuels that offered various levels of performance. At the bottom there were grass or straw-fed horses, at the next level a horse fed on oats could perform better and at the top level a horse that was full of beans would be positively frisky and ready to go!
False Flag or False Flag Actions are usually associated with the days of wooden ship warfare and a rule of combat that said it was permissible to fly a false flag identifying yourself as a ship of another nation provided – as long as you ran up your own flag (showed your true colours) before the action started. Imagine, how vital it was to correctly identify whether an approaching ship was friend or foe and yet this curious, mannered rule of combat, offered a means of legitimate deception.
The phrase continued beyond the days of wooden ships right up to the present day when radar, radio and transponders have rendered identification by flag obsolete. So the meaning in today’s world is that one side in a dispute makes it appear that the other side has done something against the rules of war – of course, both historically and currently, the whole idea of false flag actions depends on the idea of both sides obeying, or appearing to obey, the rules of war. In the current war in Ukraine, Russia has claimed that some destruction of civilian targets in Ukraine was actually performed by Ukrainian troops in an effort to smear Russia’s reputation. It has become more and more apparent that Russia has no regard for the rules of war and their false flag actions are part of their propaganda and disinformation campaigns to try and persuade Western countries not to support Ukraine and to bamboozle the Russian people to keep on supporting their leader.
However, the concept of False Flags goes back as far as the bible! The Bible speaks of false flags, or deceptions, by false prophets that will be used against believers in the days before Christ’s second coming (see Matt. 24:11) so perhaps the concept of false flag actions as being a moral part of the rules of war has biblical precedent.
Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz
Are you aFriend of Dorothy?
Here we are in the realm of secret signs – to ask someone “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” you are enquiring about someone’s sexual orientation in a way that will not cause offence if you are completely mistaken, and will mean nothing to others who might overhear – False Flag action if you like… Where does it come from?
It is probably a reference to Dorothy Gale – she of The Wizard of Oz fame and who was played by Judy Garland, one of the archetypal gay icons. There was a series of Oz books and it is the second one into which many queer themes have been read. I am still getting accustomed to the rehabilitation of, and reclaiming by gay people, of the word queer, because when I was growing up, it was a very pejorative term but I am beginning to see that it is difficult to find a better word for many aspects of the LGBTQ world and in particular, the references in “The Road to Oz – book two in the Oz series. There is the character Polychrome, who says “You have some queer friends, Dorothy”, and she replies, “The queerness doesn’t matter, so long as they’re friends.”. When Dorothy asks Scarecrow which way to go on the yellow-brick road he says, “Of course, some people go both ways” which is presumably a reference to bi-sexuality. You can find a fuller account here on Wikipedia and for a good exploration of what constitutes a gay icon here. To summarize though, a gay icon does not necessarily have to be gay themselves, or even of the same sex as their gay fan base – Judy Garland had a devoted fan base of homosexual men and she illustrates one of the oft-defining aspects of a gay icon – she had an unhappy life, constantly married the wrong men, struggles with drugs and alcohol, and difficulties as a woman in a male-run business – all struggles with which many gay men and women identify with. Additionally, gay icons may have a camp aspect, intentionally or not, and are often supportive of the LGBTQ community – Judy Garland’s love for her gay fan base was reciprocal.
The ”N” word has been reclaimed by some people of colour, but I would not, nor should anyone else use it, however “queer” is not only an eponymous self-identifying term, as in LGBTQ, but has a long history as a word to describe people and behaviours, so I guess I will use it with its newly rehabilitated status
“Are you a friend of Dorothy” is not exactly a secret language – we will come to that later in the month, but it is a code – a secret communication – one which has become less used in those countries lucky enough to have legalised homosexuality and LGBTQ rights have generally liberalised. I wonder whether in less fortunate countries, they have the same phrase or one less predicated on Western and in particular, Hollywood culture…
I read an article that is very challenging regarding the language around and including LGBTQ in The Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan – you may agree or disagree with him but he is thought-provoking… [P.S. 21st May. In a further and excellent article by Andrew Sullivan, he delineates clearly the division between Queer and Homosexual and how the former have captured the narrative and what the consequences of that are – I may have to post about it…]
Finally, another couple of examples of Cant languages from Wikipedia,
Though similar sounding, Early Hours and Early Doors, are quite different in origin. The first is another example of Cockney rhyming slang whilst the other, though now associated with football commentary, has an earlier origin.
Although theatres no longer practice the Early Doors system, the phrase was popularised in football commentary and much like Back to Square One, has achieved a universality in the wider world. From this excellent blog on word origins – “Why footballers, commentators and fans say ‘early doors’, when ’early’ or ‘early on’ would work just as well is probably due to Big Ron, otherwise Ron Atkinson, a well-known television football commentator, a former player and manager now regarded as one of the characters of the sport.” However, in the wider world, Early Doors has indeed become a favourite elaboration on ‘early on’.
Early Hours is rhyming slang for flowers and is a clever reference to the fact that the flower markets in London opened very early in the morning to allow the fragile blooms to reach the shops in peak conditions. Early Doors, on the other hand, goes back to the Nineteenth Century theatres and music halls in London who came up with the idea of charging a premium for patrons to go into the theatre and select their own best positions in the unreserved areas. This is seen in modern days in paying a premium fare to board a plane at the front of the queue rather than experiencing the general scrimmage.
We all come to know the meaning of this expression at some point in our lives because it is a frequently used simile for people ignoring refusing to acknowledge the most obvious thing in a given situation, just as an elephant in the room would be hard to ignore. The origin of the expression is less well known but is from an 1814 short story by Ivan Krylov – a poet and fabulist ( a composer or teller of fables), called “The Inquisitive Man”. A man who has just visited a museum runs into a friend and is effusive about the wonders of nature he has just seen, and he enumerates them. His friend, who is obviously familiar with the museum, says to him “but did you see the elephant? (…) I’ll be bound you felt as if you were looking at a mountain.” But the first man has failed to notice the elephant – absorbed as he was with the smaller exhibits – embarrassed, he begs his friend not to tell anyone that he had failed to notice the elephant in the room.
A fable, as opposed to a mere story, consciously tries to tell us something with a special or enlightening meaning and I am sure that Ivan Krylov would be proud to know that his short story has given us a phrase which has no equivalent for its simplicity and memorability. We may talk of Occam’s Razor, or that which is Staring Us in the Face, but the Elephant in the Room wins hands down!
Lastly, today’s example of Cant (see the letter C post for an explanation or go to Wikipedia) is Engsh, from Kenya.
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.
If you thought yesterday’s tales of Brass Monkeys, was weird, then the origin of the word (etymology) “Cockney” is probably the weirdest etymology of any word I have ever come across!
I first learned the story of the word Cockney or Cockeney, from the incomparable writer of prose – Margaret Visser. The cover reproduced above is from the great 60p Penguin book which contains extracts from two of her books including “Much Depends on Dinner” – a socio-historic account of what we eat and why we eat it. In the extract “Man’s Eye View” Margaret recounts how “when a hen produced a small, malformed egg, as sometimes happens at first laying, the unsuccessful object used to be called a ‘cock’s egg’ or ‘cockeney’ in early English. The word was often used of a foolish or spoilt child, the pride of its doting mother; and then by country people to put down soft and ignorant city-dwellers. The expression was taken over by Londoners and used with pride: it is the origin of the word Cockney.”
Margaret Visser is a sublime writer of prose and although much of her writing is about and around, food, I strongly recommend her “The Geometry of Love – Space. Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church”
This embracing of a term that was meant to be insulting, is symptomatic of the East Enders (of London) – to consider themselves different (better) than others as is their development of Cockney Rhyming Slang. Linguists have several terms, all with slightly different meanings, for such linguistic phenomena –
Cant – which can be divided into Cryptolet, Argot, Pseudo-language, Secret Language or – and this is the best fit for Cockney Rhyming Slang – an Anti-language. According to Wikipedia Cant is “the ‘jargon’ or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group” Anti-languages “borrow words from other languages, create unconventional compounds or use new suffixes for existing words”. Cockney Rhyming Slang works in a unique way, with a double layer of hiding the meaning. Confusing enough to say “Give us a butcher’s hook” when you mean “Give us a look”, but to those familiar with the phrase, it is not even necessary to say the whole phrase, just “Give us a butchers” hence the jump from butchers to look is made even more obscure! I urge you to read the full article on Cant because it is fascinating. Meanwhile, here are a few examples of Cockney Rhyming Slang beginning with C. “Can’t keep still!” = Treadmill (a form of hard labour punishment in 19C prisons). Crowded space = Suitcase – this conflates the rhyme with the fact that a suitcase can easily be stolen in a crowded space such as a railway station. And most definitely not PC by today’s terms “Cut and Carried” = Married – a wife would be cut off from the support of her original family and would instead be carried or provided for by her husband.
Since the Wikipedia article on Cant (language) provides a compendious and most excellent list of examples from around the world, I am going to include their links in each day’s post for all except the letters D,O,Q,U and W for which there are no examples. So to catch up to date – here are the A-C examples of Cant…
With A Chip on your shoulder! – we are back in the world of sailors – or at least as close as the naval dockyards. Samuel Pepys, though more famous as a diarist, had a day job as the civil servant tasked with sorting out and rationalising the naval dockyards and although I know not whether the following custom can be ascribed to Pepys or not, it is certainly the kind of efficiency he might have instigated. So – during the construction of wooden ships, there is, necessarily a lot of waste wood – offcuts if you will. The workers in the yard were allowed to take these offcuts home for use as fuel – BUT – only if they measured less than a foot long, and these pieces of wood were referred to as “Chips”. At the dockyard gate stood an official charged with judging whether the chips were small enough to qualify and one can imagine that as with all positions of relative power, the system was open to corruption, favouritism and cronyism. So whilst all the dockyard workers might literally have had chips on their shoulders, the expression became used to describe one who did not get on well with the measurer of chips and who could not get away with any chip slightly over the limit… For a fuller account click here.
In 1872, soft-drink maker Hiram Codd of Camberwell, London, designed the bottle shown above which became known as a Codd Bottle. It was used to bottle carbonated soft drinks or fermented but non-alcoholic drinks such as ginger beer by filling the bottle whilst upside down and once full, the pressure of the co2 gas would force the marble in the neck against a rubber seal where the pressure would keep the bottle sealed. The BBC’s Antiques Road Show were presented with a perfectly intact Codds Bottle whose value they placed in the thousands of pounds due to rarity value. As they explained, children, on finding the bottles, knocked the tops of to get at the marble – hence the rarity. They also asserted that to open the bottle and pour the drink out, you had to hit or wallop the marble smartly and force it downwards – hence the codswallop! Other theories are that the word wallop was slang for “beer” and that beer drinkers disdained the non-alcoholic offerings such as ginger beer, as rubbish. Codding is an old word for joking, so somewhere in those ideas – codswallop emerged and lived on well beyond the life of the Codds Bottle, to mean rubbish. This illustrates how the original meaning of a word or phrase, can not simply be lost, but theories can multiply, and with the world-wide web, theories can spread – often without the rigorous referencing that might allow the truth, in so far as any historic truth can be known, to emerge.
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?
By Item is held by John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14511438
“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!
“You are the apple of my eye!” – If ever there was an expression that we all use and know the meaning of but which – when you really think about it – does not quite make sense – this is it! The indefatigable Wikipedia has this to say “The phrase “apple of my eye” refers in English to something or someone that one cherishes above all others.” So much for the usage, it then goes on to say “Originally, the phrase was simply an idiom referring to the pupil of the eye.” Wikipedia continues that the earliest recorded usage is from the 9th Century in a publication attributed to Alfred the Great (he of the burnt cakes and the persistent spider) but then refers to Shakespeare and finally to the King James edition of The Bible. Shakespeare is credited with originating so many words and phrases that one has to wonder whether it is merely that he was such a prolific playwright and thus he is the first to write down certain things – after all, who goes around inventing words and phrases – especially a man who played to the hoi polio and to the gentry within the same play – jokes for the former and subtle machinations for the latter. Would it not be confusing to be inventing things? Likewise with the bible – surely the translator from the Hebrew text, used common parlance or idiom to make the Bible understandable. However, both Shakespeare (in Midsummer Night’s Dream) and instances in the bible seem to be using the Apple of Your Eye to refer to the dark pupil at the centre of the eye, or possibly to the entire eye. Personally, as a lover of apples, I always took the phrase to conflate the seeing of and comparison to a beloved object such as an apple…
My father, who was an academic at the University of Oxford, was fond of pointing out, that “To most of the world, the word Academic, means irrelevant!” That makes the word Academic a contranym – a word which has two opposite meanings – high brow and irrelevant. Other examples are:- To cleave
Definition 1: to join or adhere closely; cling.
Example 1: The shy baby rabbit cleaved to his mother’s body.
Definition 2: to split or divide, especially by cutting.
Example 2: The hunter uses a Swiss Army knife to cleave the rabbit’s meat from the bone. To sanction
Definition 1: to permit or grant approval.
Example 1: In some countries, the government sanctions the ownership of guns by private citizens.
Definition 2: to condemn or penalize.
Example 2: In some states, the government imposes sanctions on the ownership of guns by private citizens.
Where does the word academic come from? Plato’s Academy was taught by the great philosopher in the public gardens known as “the grove of Akadēmos,” a legendary Athenian of the Trojan War tales (his name, Latinized as Academus, apparently means “of a silent district”), who was original estate-holder of the site”, see here for more.
Do contranyms make the learning of the English language more difficult than other languages (do other languages also have contranyms? Do please tell…) Not as hard as the verbs at the end of the sentence putting (German) or having to know the gender of objects (many languages) and not always either guessable or logical either! There are not such an onerous number of contranyms to be learned and to dumb down the language by avoiding their use would, I think, be a loss – so I cleave to contranyms…*
This is my fourth year of the A to Z Challenge and I am frantically trying to get posts written ahead of time – as I have promised myself each year apart from 2020 when I only discovered the Challenge on the first day and so had to pants it all the way through. Still, that was the year of lockdown and so there was a certain amount of time available! So here we are again…
It takes time to forget things – whether as an individual whose head becomes, eventually, too crammed to contain everything at the front of our minds, ready for use, or as a society, a group of individuals. At least with a group, there is less chance of forgetting things because we can utilise our collective memories – if one person is having a senior moment, perhaps another will have the thing, the word, or the phrase, to hand. Nevertheless, things do get forgotten, and language mutates so that the original sound and its meaning are lost – there is a Pub in Leeds, West Yorkshire, called “The Skyrack” and on its swinging picture sign (originally provided for those unable to read), there is a picture of a very large oak tree – something which shines no light on the meaning of “skyrack”. However, across the road is another pub called “The Shire Oak” and this reveals that “skyrack” is an ameliorated version of “Shire Oak” – the very large oak tree which once stood on this spot. Over time, the word has been run together and changed out of recognition.
Another way that the meaning of things gets lost, is because words and phrases get borrowed from one group of people to another, things that have an obvious utility at the time, but later, when the original group are no longer around, become obfuscated. We shall encounter a lot of words and phrases from the days of wooden sailing ships where sailors had many phrases that described their work – work conducted far away from their homelands and whilst the sailor’s object was not to disguise their meanings – why should they – but simply because they needed a large lexicon of their own special work terms. We shall encounter other phrases whose origins have been lost because the originally referred to practice has died out…
On the other hand, many groups of people have chosen or found it necessary to conceal their meanings from others – Cockneys, fairground workers, criminals and those persecuted for their race, class, gender or sexuality. Even children within a family may develop a whole language of their own – for fun or to keep their communications private and themselves safe. If you were in one such family and feel able to – please share in the comments…
And so I will not just be looking for the lost origins of words and phrases whose meanings we know and still use, but reflecting on the type of words, their original purpose and the scheme of the language they “hail” from, and right there is a word describing the way that sailors would call out to passing ships, out on the great expanses of the world’s oceans – where they “hail” from, what is their identity – that is what people most want to know about a passing stranger…
Post Script I have been participating in a writing group led by Deborah Bayer of “Healers Write, Writers Heal” who is also participating in the A to Z Challenge 2023 and by chance, she shared a poem which is exactly about the modification of words and the development of secret languages in families. In the poem “Besayadoo” by Yalie Saweda Kamara, she describes sitting with her Grandmother, who herself talks in a patois English, and watching two boys, thug-like in appearance, give a tender touch and salutation as they part. Grandmother understands the gestures but cannot understand the word besayadoo, and the poet has to translate it as “Be Safe Dude!” at which the grandmother says that the boys are not the thugs they appear to be. You can read the poem over at The Slowdown – a blog which invites you to do just that, through poetry…
