SAILOR TALK.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVIII, Issue 155, 30 June 1917, Page 13

SAILOR TALK.

QUAINT SEA LANGUAGE. To hear a party of sailormcn spinning yarns is a thing of sheer delight—if you 'understand their language. There is little use " putting the listeners on " if you do not. especially after conversation "cts fairly "on tlie Hood," for you will be more likely to find yourself bewildered than edilied once chins begin to wag freely. Right cheery memories have I of a certain cabin, in which a group of men. tanned by the winds anil weather of all dimes, used to muster daily and pas.s the world by in a sort of anecdotal review while tlie old ship rolled. Sailors' varus have the fascinating quality that 'comes of spontaneity. No suspicion of an ordered sequence dims the glowing reality of the scenes they depict. One hears tlie birds and visualises palm-fringed beaches in the South Seas; a shake of the kaleidoscope. and there emerges a picture of Boatswain Sa! and Hongkong harbour: then swiftly tiiis gives place to one of the ice-bound north, while the Indies or tlie Straits will surely crop up in due turn. And there arc quaint touches in it. A man will suddenly break off "doubling Cape Horn" to ask, "That's Trafalgar Square where they've got Nelson penned in top o' Whitehall, ain't is Well, this chap was Cockney,'' and—the aside having served to elucidate a point in the narrative — the speaker goes back to Cape Horn again. To you landsmen his uncertainty about tlie location of Trafalgar Square may seem to reveal a str.mge ignorance. But does it' Why should the sai'or who liver- in the Creit Freedom of the salt water bother about learning the topography of so small a place as London, which is always anchored in the same spot! Only the comic-opera -lack Tar "shivers his timbers" or '"hitches up his slacks." Real sailor talk widely frqm this

stage patter. For one thing it is much more puzzling. If a naval man asked you to "come aboard and make your number" you might guess a long time before you realised that, in plain English, he had simply invited you to call upon i him. Having got thus far in your edu-j cation the "come aboard" grows fairly! obvious. "Make your number means "send in your name." Upon arriving at a port or joining a flag, ships announce their identity by "making their number." Hence the origin of the phrase. "Top your boom" an opposite signification, conveying that your room would be preferred to your company. Telling a man to "pipe down" is equivalent to asking him to cease talking, "(lew up" has a similar meaning. If Jack wished to explain that the way lay open to all he would put it that there was "a free gangway." Speaking of someone who had started at the bottom and climbed, he would probably tell you that the individual "came in through the hawse hole." an ancient way of expressing that one joined as an ordinary seaman. "Rig In your st'un-sails" means "put down your elbows,"' while to say that anyone has "reeved his arm through the ring-bolt" indicates that he is taking his ease. An indolent person "hangs on the slack." A man does not die or get killed: he "loses the number of his moss." An indifferent fellow is contemptuously referred to as "ullage." The sailor who meets with a set-back has "flipped"' or "got ditched." An admiral or captain dismissed from his command is described as "beached," or, it may be, at "put upon the beach." Bluejackets do not quarrel, they "part brass-rags." and when Jack thinks it is time to have a drink he cocks his eye "forrard" and remarks that "the sun has come over the foreyard." For the most part sea-talk has itroots in the days of the square-rigged ship. But the war i= enriching it with new phrases. Among the most curious of these ranks "Zeppelins in a cloud," which, though you woni 1 never guess it. is Jack's new name for that familiar de'.icacv "sausage and mashed." —JackA ijj Sis "Daily Mj'K