SAILORS’ WORDS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LVI, 13 June 1925, Page 9

SAILORS’ WORDS

COMMONLY USED IN SPEAKING ENGLISH Perhaps most Britons notice the strong nautical flavour of their language even Jess than they taste the salt in their bread. Yet the conversations and writings of landsmen are besprinkled freely—interlarded, one might almost say—with unadulterated sea terminology.. In Sussex not long since (says Jay Pollock in the Daily Mail), I heard London’s wireless voice ascribe a certain phenomenon to the effect of rail on aerial “halliards.” To how many 1 wonder, did that word flash a vivid memory picture of tho deck of a ship in full sail—a frightened ship caught in a hard squall, her crew lowering away at the sail halliards with urgent quickness lest the unknown weight of wind to come out of that blackness should dismast her or upset her? When people tell each other that by something or other they were “taken aback,” does this expressive sea phrase conjure in their minds the vision of a square-rigged ship stopped and thrown into flustered confusion by tho breeze coming on tho wrong'side of her sails? Or when they talk of carrying on “till all’s blue,” does the vision come of old wind-wafted galloons standing to seaward from the colourful land into the blue of sky and tho blue of sea? On shore, men talk glibly of the “bitter end 1 ” without knowing of what they speak. Some notion they have of meaning figurative bitterness of finality. They reck not of a storm-trapped ship seeking to prevent her anchors dragging by paying oat her cables to their bitter end—tho ends secured on hoard to the liltt. “It’s all plain sailing,” says the landlubber when his path is easy, lie is merely repeating the saying of some bygone navigator. Except that what tho latter really said was “plane” sailing, which is the very simplest way of computing a ship’s position. Travel as far inland as you like in our islands and you will still find sea phrases helping folk tq express themselves. “Sailing rather close to the wind” is as suggestive of some rather risky sort of proceeding to a- countryman as if is to a. sailor. And “al shipshape" trips, easily off the tongues of many who are quite unaware that it. survives from those ancient days when the world’s crack ships were, tho proud ! ships of Bristol, whose slogan was “All j ship-shape and Bristol fashion.” j