SEA SLANG.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 19, Issue 100, 18 December 1908, Page 2

SEA SLANG.

ORIGIN OF WELL-KNOWN

PHRASES

"There’ll be the devil to pay." The phrase is in common use, often with the addition "and no pitch hot.” Ninety-nine out of a hundred persons would say that it refers to the landlord of hades. But the term has nothing to do with hades or its chief occupant. It comes straight from the shipyard. In caulking a ship’s deck—that is, in filling the seams between the planks with oakum and afterwards pouring pitch over the oakum—the outside seam, being very difficult to work, came to he known as the devil. The technical term for pouring in the pitch was paying. The expression is. now clear enough. Or take again that very common expression "Close quarters,” Close quartersl or close fights, wore wooden barriers, loopholed, which stretched across a merchantman’s decks for repelling boarders. Slavers were occasionally fitted thus in case of a rising among the negroes. If we take these words and phrases in something like alphabetical order we shall at once come upon aback —"1 was completely taken aback.” A ship is taken aback when the wind has headed her, laid her sails aback and stopped her way through the water ; she halts in her tracks as the man taken aback does. To hold aloof is not so often heard now as in past days. To hold one’s aloof, or luff, was by superior sailing to keep to windward (get the weathergage) of another vessel. The term is constantly met with in old voyagers ; "we held aloof,” or, "we kept our loof.”

Bitter end is a curious instance of the entire change of moaning in a phrase; it was sometimes the hotter end. In early editions of “Robinson Crusoe” wc llnd : “Wo rode with two anchors a-head, and the cables veered out to the better end.” Bitter is, however, the more scatnanlike word.

.Old hemp cables were secured to bitts, heavy oak stumps which stood upright out of a ship’s decks ; and the bitter end of the cable was that part which was abaft the bitts; Some read it better end on the plea that the part of the cable abaft the bitts was not so much in use and was therefore the better part ; but this is not the true term. When a cable was veered out to the bitter end there waa no more, and it is in/ this sense that it has come to mean the extreme in fight or argument. Bitterness usually characterises such extremes, and so the original meaning has been lost. To run the gauntlet was a military term originally, but the seaman has made* it his own. The gant-lope (Ghent run) was invented in that town and was a punishment in which the victim was compelled to run between two linos of men armed with ropes ends with which his speed was quickened. At sea it was a thieves’ punishment and took the place of the more brutal punishment of being flogged and towed ashore astern of a boat and discharged. Ail plain sailing; this term is so spelled even in nautical works of some age, but plane sailing is the current form. Before creator invented the sea chart which goes by his name, all charts were on a plane projection. In using these the ship’s course was treated as an angle and the distance, difference of latitude and departure as the sides of a right-angled triangle. Rakish, used to describe a man or woman whose appearance is not quite respectable, was originally used of a vessel , generally a pirate or slaver, whose masts had a heavy rake or lean toward the stern. Thore are. however, several derivations of the word, some authorities taking it from rakehell, which is referred to the Swedish raka. to roam. Rakish is at any rate a recognised term to describe the extreme lean aft of the masts, and this use*d to be characteristic of the fast sailing schooner, of which rig pirates and slavers were fond.—’ London Chat.”