SAILOR'S LAMENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 208, 3 September 1927, Page 29

SAILOR'S LAMENT.

HOW LANDSMEN'S PHRASES JAR HIS NERVES. "Yes, Jack's a middy now, and on a very fast boat, too. It can do 30 knots an hour." Jack's proud father, a prominent business man in the city, unconsciously swaggered while I smiled discreetly and wondered what Jack would have said had he been there (writes Lieut.-Com-mander Barstow, R.N., in the London "Daily Mail"). Why is it that well-informed men and women who would scorn to confound, say, an airship and an aeroplane, almost invariably describe a ship as a boat ? In spite of all that naval writers like Drury, "Taffrail" and "Bartimeus" have done to break him of the horrid habit, the man-in-the-street, and more particularly his wife and daughter, insist on calling midshipmen "middies," though the term is unknown in the Fleet. Oblivious of the fact that a sailor's ship is his home, landsmen repeatedly ask, "What ship or—er —boat are you on ?" "What house or—er—caravan do you live on?" would be an equally rational reply. Again-, consider the word "knot." Although many dictionaries written by landsmen say otherwise, a knot is "a

nautical mile per hour." To talk of "30 knots an hour" is therefore equal to saying "30 nautical miles an hour."

That' laymen should make mistakes in technical phraseology is excusable; but words like ship, boat, midshipman and knot are not technical; they are everyday words, with plain, straightforward meanings.

Many landsmen seem quite unable to speak of the Navy without inventing some pseudo-naval 'jargon that doesn't exist. Not long ago we read of the capture of the deposed Greek Dictator in the "wireless-turret" of a destroyer. A destroyer with any sort of turret would be unique; one fitted with a "wireless turret" must indeed be a strange craft. But "wireless-room"—which happens to be the term in general use on board 6liip for the compartment containing the wireless installation— is too simple for the layman. The Navy often wonders why.