Three Sheets to the Wind: The Nautical Phrases We Still Use Today

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But see, before radio, a ship spoke through its flags, its colors, your colors, told the world who you were and whose side you were on. And here's where it gets a little bit devious. A warship was legally allowed to fly a false flag. All right, my friends, today we're going to take a little different tactic. So let's say it's a Tuesday. Just a regular old run of the mill Tuesday. And you wake up feeling a little under the weather. But you've got far too much on your plate to call in sick. Your inbox is chock a block. Your boss, who is, let's be honest, a bit of a loose cannon, wants the quarterly numbers by noon and you barely know the ropes. The colleague who's supposed to help you has gone quiet, let you high and dry. So you take a different tack and try to keep things on an even keel. By and large, you're holding it together. You're running a tight ship. You hand the report to the boss who looks it up and down, decides he doesn't much like the cut of your jib. You try and defend the report, but he just tells you to pipe down. And you think, what a thoroughly modern dry land, fluorescent little disaster that was. Except it isn't modern at all. Every single one of those phrases that I just uttered under the weather. Chock a block, loose cannon, know the ropes. High and dry, take a different tack on an even keel. By and large, a tight ship, the cut of your jib piped down. Every one of them was born on the deck of a wooden ship. You weren't describing a bad day at the office. You were, without knowing it, speaking the language of the age of Sail. We all are, all day, every day. The sea is hiding in plain sight in our everyday speech. So today, on footnotes of history, we're going beachcombing through the English language. We'll find the wrecks of old ships washed up in ordinary sentences, pull them out of the sand, turn them over and work out how they got there. Some of the stories are true and a few of the best loved ones should be sent to Davy Jones locker. And we'll keel haul those too. So let's start with the obvious question. Why English? Why is the language of Shakespeare and spreadsheets so absolutely waterlogged with sailor talk? The short answer is that for the better part of three centuries, the English speaking world floated. Britain was an island that decided its destiny lay on the water and then spent generations perfecting her greatest asset, her navy and her merchant fleet. At the height of The Age of Sail. The Royal Navy was the largest industrial organization on Earth. Hundreds of thousands of men and some women passed through it. The merchant fleet was larger still. And here's the thing about a ship, it is a tiny, sealed, intensely verbal world. A square rigger might carry several miles of rope, and every single line had a name and a job. And by the way, every sailor knows there is no rope on a ship, only lines, stays, halyards, braces and sheets. And there were hundreds of them. You could not point and grunt to get your point across in a gale in the dark, a hundred feet up, you shouted the right word for the right line or bad things happened to you and possibly the ship. So sailors built one of the most precise, dense, vivid working vocabularies any trade has ever produced. And then these men came home. They went back to villages and ports and pubs and parliaments, and they brought the vocabulary with them. A landsman would overhear a phrase, like the sound of it and start using it for his own dry land troubles. Multiply that by three centuries and most of the globe and you get the language we're speaking right now. So the seed didn't just shape our trade and our wars, it shaped our language and our grammar of trouble, the words we reach for when things go wrong. Which, if you think about it, makes pretty good sense. Nobody on earth has had more practice with things going wrong than a sailor. Trust me, I know. So I should confess where this rabbit hole started for me, because it wasn't a dictionary, it was a novelist. Way back, back in 1994, I was part of a crew who brought a World War II Liberty ship from San Francisco to the beaches of Normandy to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the D Day landings. The ship was crewed almost entirely by World War II vets, and that's a story for another podcast. But while at sea, I saw one of my elder shipmates reading a book that looked pretty interesting. So over a cold beer on the poot deck, we used to have a crack open the beer at 4:30 every day when we were at sea. This was a special ship, let me tell you. So over cold beer on the poop deck, I asked him about it. And in that moment, he introduced me to the world of Patrick o', Brien, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. I picked up Master and Commander, the first of O' Brien's 20 Auburn Maturin novels, set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars, and I was completely hooked. It's been a lifelong joy for me to Read those books. I've read them all three, four times by the pros. The dialogue and the window into that wooden world known as the Royal Navy in the age of Sailors. It had me hooked. And I think it's mostly because o' Brien does something that most historical novelists, they're far too polite to do. He refuses to translate. He refuses to stoop down to the ignorance of the average reader and actually explain what he's talking about. He drops you onto the deck of a fighting frigate and lets the language wash right over you, unexplained. The sheets and braces, the weather gauge, the bow lines, the hundreds of words of working sailors. Speech exactly as a green midshipman would have heard them on his first morning aboard. You don't understand the half of it. And that's entirely the point, because o' Brien hands you a guide who is every bit as lost as you are. He's very important to the story. Stephen Maturin, the ship's surgeon, a brilliant physician and a naturalist and a hopeless landlubber who never quite learns the ropes. If you've seen the movie Master and Commander, you know who I'm talking about. He's forever tumbling over the side and asking what on earth everyone is bellowing about. Maturin is essentially us. The reader learns the language right alongside it, by immersion, by drowning in it a little. And somewhere in all that immersion, I started noticing that I already knew some of the words, that they leaked out of those wooden ships and into my own everyday speech, and I never once stopped to ask where they came from. That's the itch this whole episode is scratching. Actually, one of the first ones I remember was a phrase between the devil and the deep blue sea. And we'll get to that in good time. So thank you, Mr. O', Brien, God rest your soul. This one's your fault. So we'll start where every sailor started. At the bottom, knowing nothing, surrounded by all right rope. So know the ropes. A new hand, or a landman, as they were called. A landman came aboard and was confronted with that forest of rigging. Hundreds of lines, each one with its own name. Halyards, sheets, braces, stays, shrouds. Until he could find the right one by feel in the dark. You are useless and you are dangerous. To know the ropes was to have actually learned the job. We still say it and we still mean exactly that. A person who knows the ropes is the one you can trust with the work, solid as they come. And notice we're only one phrase in an Already standing rope up to our knees. Here's one that you know. Three sheets to the wind. A sheet on a ship is not a sail and it's not something that you put on your bed. Everyone assumes it's the sail, but it's actually the rope. It's the line, specifically the line that controls the angle of the sail. Trim the sheets and the sails are taut and drawing and the ship sails sweet and true. But let a sheet go loose and the sail it controls starts flapping in the wind, useless and flogging all over the place. Let one sheet fly and the ship gets unsteady. Let three sheets fly and she staggers and lurches across the water with no control at all. Wallowing, weaving, fallen off her course, which is of course exactly how a person walks home from the pub. Three sheets to the wind. Gloriously, helplessly drunk. And sailors even graded it. One sheet to the wind was tipsy, three sheets was legless. There was a whole drunkenness scale and it was based on the re our next one taken aback. So we'll stay with the wind here a moment on a square rigger. The wind normally fills the sails from behind, bellying them forward. But if the wind suddenly shifts or careless helmsman lets the ship swing too far, the wind can catch the front of the sails and flatten them back against the masts. The ship is taken aback, stopped dead, even, shoved backwards, rigging groaning under the strain. It's sudden, it's alarming, and for a moment nobody's in control. So when something today leaves you taken aback, you're describing precisely that. The breath knocked out of you, momentum reversed, caught completely off guard by a wind you didn't see shit. This is one of my favorites. Next one. By and large, and rarely anybody gets this one. And you wouldn't think it's from the sea, but by and large we use it to mean, on the whole, mostly, or all things considered. But it's pure sailing. It's two technical terms stitched together. To sail by the wind means to sail close to the wind as near as you could point into it. To sail large, meant to sail with the wind coming from behind you. The easy point of sail. A ship that handled well both by and large, behaved well in all conditions, into the wind and away from a good all round ship. And from there it's a short hop to by and large. She's a fine vessel. And then to the way we use it now without a drop of seawater in sight. Next one, chock a block back to that Office inbox. A ship moved heavy loads with block and tackle systems of pulleys. The blocks with rope running between them haul until the two blocks jam right up against each other and can come no closer. And you've gone as far as a tackle will go. No more travel. That's chock a block. Jammed full, completely maxed out, not one inch of room left. Your inbox, your calendar, the car park at Christmas. Chock a block. This is another good one, this next one, because it sounds like it's about sorrow and it's really not. Or at least it didn't start that way. On deck, there were sturdy posts called bits, and the anchor cable was wound around them. The very last section of that cable, the cable is another name for the haws, or the anchor cable. The very last section of that cable, the inboard end nearest the bits, was the bitter end. So when you paid out the anchor cable all the way and reached the bitter end, you had run completely out of rope, nothing left to give. It hit the absolute limit. The bitter sounds like grief and exhaustion. It's actually a happy accident that language has enjoyed for hundreds of years. But the original bitter end was just the end of your rope, literally. Now, to haul a line quickly, a sailor pulls hand over hand, or as they had it, hand over fist, one hand grabbing above the other in a fast, steady rhythm, reeling the rope in. It meant rapid, relentless progress. So when we say somebody is making money hand over fist, we're picturing exactly that. Cash coming in as fast as a strong man can haul a wet rope. Steady, greedy, quick. Now, a ship's berth was its room to maneuver, to see room it needed to swing safely at anchor or to pass another vessel without a collision. To give a hazard a wide berth was to leave yourself plenty of margin to keep well clear of the rocks and the reefs. And the other captain you didn't trust. We still give people a wide berth. That colleague, that topic at the dinner table. And we mean the same prudent thing. Stay far enough off that nothing can hold you below the waterline, given a wide berth. And here's two. We're going to give you two in this one, high and dry and an uneven keel. And it's. I think I spoke about them at the beginning. Yeah, I did. So when a ship is high and dry, when the tide goes out and leaves her grounded above the waterline, stuck in the mud, going nowhere until the water comes back, stranded, abandoned and out of options, and a ship is on an even keel when she sits level in the water not healing drunkenly over to one side. She's balanced, she's stable and she's under control. We've barred both for our own lives ever since. And you can hear why. Half of being a person is just trying to stay on an even keel and not get left high and dry. So a ship, it was a workplace, it was a home, it was a workplace, but it was also a society. It was cramped, it was damp, it was a gossiping little town. And the words it gave us for drinking, eating and rumor are some of the. I mean, they're some of the most common words we use in our language today. So picture the Royal Navy in 1740. Every sailor is entitled to a daily ration of rum and not a little measure. They would get about half a pint of pure overproof rum, all given in one go. So the predictable result was a fighting fleet that spent its afternoons absolutely hammered, which is not ideal when you're 100ft up handling live rope over an open ocean. So enter Admiral Edward Vernon. And Vernon was famous for a cloak made of a coarse weatherproof fabric called Grogham. And the sailors who nicknamed everyone called him Old Grog. And In August of 1740, Old Grog issued an order. From now on, the rum ration would be cut with water before it was served out. The men were, predictably, absolutely furious. And the watered down drink they grumbled into took the admiral's nickname and they call it Grog. Which is why to this day, when you've had a few too many and you're slow and you're bleary, the next morning you feel groggy, you are etymologically. That was a tough word. Etymologically. Suffering from a dose of an 18th century admiral's cost saving measurements and the order to issue an extra ration as a reward to splice. The main brace survives in the Navy as a phrase for a celebratory drink, because the main brace was a heavy, miserable rope to splice. And the job earned you a tot of rum. So now, where did sailors do their gossiping? They did it at the scuttle butt. A butt was a large cask. To scuttle something is to cut a hole in it. The same word we use for deliberately sinking a ship by holding a hull. So a scuttlebutt was a water cask with a hole cut in the top, kept on deck holding the day's drinking water. And men being men, the spot where everyone stopped for a drink of water became the spot where everyone stopped to trade rumors, actually, at the Naval Academy, all the little water fountains all over the place that were all called scuttlebutts. It was the ship's water cooler, and exactly the same as the water cooler that we have today. The scuttlebutt was where you heard the captain was in a foul mood, that nobody had been paid, that there was trouble in the next port. And so scuttlebutt came to mean the gossip itself, the latest word going around, and the US Navy absolutely still uses it that way. Three centuries later, we're still gathered around the water, talking out of turn. Here's another one of my favorites, and not a lot of folks know this. The ship's cook. He spent his days boiling great quantities of salted meat, salt beef or salt pork. And as it was boiled, fat rose to the surface. He would skim off this fat, and they called it slush. And slush had value. It greased and it waterproofed. It greased the mainmast so he could raise the sails easier. The sailors used it almost like a nasty butter that they would mash their hardtack biscuits into and make this kind of a mealy slush, I suppose. But if they cook, he would collect the slush. He would sell it, usually back to the sailors. And if the cook valued his life, he put part of the money that he earned from selling that slush into a common pot to buy small comforts for the crew. And that pot was the slush punt. So it began as something rather kind, a kitty for the lass, funded by skimmed fat. And it only picked up its modern smell later when the same phrase got attached to quiet pots of money kept off the books for purposes nobody wanted examined too closely. Today, a slush fund is faintly corrupt. And what did sailors call old rope? Rope too worn and frayed to trust with a load. They called it junk. It got cut up and repurposed, picked apart into fibers used for caulking and padding and sold off. Junk was the worn out, the discarded, the past, its prime. From the salvaged rope on its ship's deck, the word drifted ashore to mean any worthless old stuff. The junk in your garage, the junk mail, the junk food, it's all in spirit. Somebody's frayed out rigging. The original money for old rope was the cook selling the slush and the boatswain selling the junk. So now, kind of to a sharp end, the words that came out of battle, deception, and the constant deadly business of working out who that ship on the horizon really was. An Enemy or a friend. So at sea, before radio, a ship spoke through its flags, its colors, your colors told the world who you were and whose side you were on. And here's where it gets a little bit devious. A warship was legally allowed to fly a false flag to lure an enemy close to sail up, flying the wrong colors, friendly as you please. Remember that movie Master and Commander? That's what old boy Aubrey did there towards the end. The one rule, the rule of honor was that you had to hold down the false flag and run up your true colors and before you open fire. So to show your true colors was the moment of truth. The instant the deception dropped and everyone saw what you really were. On the happy flip side, a ship that won her battle and came home with her flag still flying, undamaged and proud came in with flying colors, victorious, unmistakable. Nothing to hide. We still pass our exams with flying colors, sailing back into harbor with every flag aloft. So back to the horizon and the problem of an unknown ship. The jib is the triangular sail right at the bow out front. And the precise shape, the cut of a ship's jib varied by nation and by builder. An experienced sailor could glance at a distant vessel, read the cut of her jib and make a fair guess at where she was from and whether he should worry. A snap judgment. Made an appearance alone. And that's exactly how we use it. When you don't like the cut of someone's jib, you've sized them up at a glance from the set of them before they've ever said a word. Possibly unfair, but often pretty correct. Now, the loose cannon. Picture a gun deck. In heavy seas, a naval cannon weighed as much as a modern small car, held in place by stout ropes, precisely so the rolling of the ship couldn't move it because if those ropes parted, if a cannon broke free in rough weather, you now had a couple of tons of iron on wheels careening across a pitching deck, crushing men and smashing through the hull on every roll. Utterly unpredictable, impossible to catch. A loose cannon was about the most dangerous thing that could happen, short of fire or sinking. So that's the image behind the colleague to worry about, the politician nobody can control. Not malicious, necessarily. Just heavy, fast, unsecured and liable to do tremendous damage on the next roll. And I'll note, for honesty's sake that the metaphor itself is younger than the danger it really takes off in the 19th century, helped along by a vivid runaway canon scene in a Victor Hugo novel. But the terror was real long before the phrase was now, the boatswain, the bosun, ran the ship's working day with a special whistle, the bosun's pipe. And each tune was an order the whole crew knew by ear. At the end of the day came the pipe down, the signal to send the off duty watch below decks to their hammocks for quiet and lights out. To be piped down was to be sent below and told, in effect, that the noise was over for the night. And so to tell someone to pipe down is to tell them, with a boatswain's authority, to settle down and be quiet. Now, ships, they didn't just carry cargo and sailors, they carried often disease and danger and the constant nearness of death. And they left us a vocabulary for all those things like quarantine and a clean bill of health. And this one is pretty relevant to all of us. Now, in the great trading ports of the Mediterranean, in Venice and the city of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik, the authorities learned the hard way that a ship arriving from a plague stricken port could empty a city of the living. So the imposed isolation, the suspect ship and her crew had to anchor offshore and wait in quarantine before anyone could land. And the period they settled on was 40 days. The Italian for 40 is quaranta quarantina. A span of 40, that's the whole word. Quarantine is just 40 days, fossilized. And the document that let a healthy ship skip the wait, that certified she sailed from a port free of disease, well, that's called a bill of health. A clean bill of health meant you were cleared to come ashore, no plague aboard, nothing to declare to the quarantine officer. We still get a clean bill of health from the doctor still being waved past, the harbor master of the body told. Not that there's nothing aboard worth quarantining. Here's a gentler one. The weather side of a ship is the side the wind. And the spray came from, the exposed, miserable, soaking wet side. The lookout posted on the weather bow in foul conditions took the worst of it. Cold, wet wind, hour after hour. A man stationed there, or sent below because he was already ailing, was under the weather in the most literal sense, pinned beneath the elements, feeling rotten. The phrase kept the feeling and dropped the spray. When you're under the weather today, you're that soaked, shivering lookout, just metaphorically. And now this is kind of one of my favorites. I like this one. But this is also the kind of phrase where the salty story is kind of irresistible and the truth might be more complicated. And that's kind of what this show is for. So it's the devil to pay. So here's the sailor's version, and I think it's pretty good. And I think it's true, or maybe I prefer to think it's true. On a wooden ship, the seams between the hull's planks had to be sealed or paid with hot pitch and tar to keep the water out. And there was one particular scene, long and awkward and devilishly hard to reach, that sailors are said to have nicknamed the devil. Paying the devil was a wretched job done, hanging over the side with waves coming up and slapping all over you. So the devil to pay and no pitch hot meant does a horrible job ahead, and we're not even ready to do it. And between the devil and the deep blue sea, that's the poor soul wedged on the outside of the hull, balanced between that awful seam and the water below. A tight spot indeed. It's a wonderful story, but the truth is most serious word. Historians think it's probably a later sailor's rationalization. The devil to pay shows up in English meaning a reckoning with the actual devil, a Faustian bargain coming due earlier than we can clearly pin the shipboard sense. So the scene called the devil, it might be real sailor slang that grew up alongside a phrase that already existed. So I'm telling you both because I'd rather you have the truth and tell the tale than just tell the tale. And honestly, knowing it's contested makes it more interesting. But I prefer kind of sailors version. And here's another one. Pooped. The raised deck at the very back of the ship was the poop deck, from the French and Latin for the stern. Nothing to do with what you're thinking. In a following storm, a big sea could rear up behind the ship and break clean over that stern. And when that happened, the ship was said to be pooped, swamped from behind, staggered, half drowned, momentarily overwhelmed, which is very likely why, when you're completely wiped out at the end of a long day, you say you're pooped. A wave the size of a house just broke over your stern. Metaphorically, I hope. So. Now some myths we'll open up the mythlocker because for every true nautical phrase, there are three that everyone swears blind came from the navy, and they didn't. These are the tall tales, the etymologies that are just a bit too neat, a bit too clever, and a bit too pleased with themselves. They're catnip for a certain kind of dad at a certain kind of barbecue. And one by one, we're going to take them out and look at them in daylight. So brace yourselves. Posh. This is a big one. Where did the word posh come from? So posh supposedly stands for port out, starboard home. The idea being that wealthy passengers sailing to India and back booked the shady, cooler side of the ship both ways, and their tickets were stamped posh. It is a beautiful, tidy, completely fictional story. There's no evidence, none of tickets stamped posh. My dad was a crew member on the queen Mare, and he said he never saw such a thing. No shipping line has ever produced one as far as we can tell. Word historians have gone looking repeatedly and come back empty handed. Posh, meaning smart or upper class, appears in English without any of this acronym business. And the port out, starboard home tale seems to have been invented after the fact to explain a word people already used. It's a backronym. The story built backwards from the letters. A nice one, but it's still false. So into the mythlocker it goes. Here's one that sounds kind of rude, but it's. I don't know. I'm sure you've heard of it. Freeze the balls off a brass monkey. It's a crude favorite with an elaborate fake pedigree. The story goes that cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid on a brass tray called a monkey, and that in cold weather, the brass contracted faster than the iron, the stack collapsed, and the balls rolled off. Hence cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. But it ain't true. There's no evidence ships ever stored cannonballs this way. Loose iron spheres rolling free on a pitching deck is an absolute nightmare, not a storage solution. Shot was kept in racks with holes called shot garlands. And they stayed. They didn't fall out. They were put there on purpose so they wouldn't go across the deck. And there's no evidence of any tray called a monkey. And the physics don't work. The temperature change needed to pop a stack of heavy cannonballs through differential contraction is kind of absurd. The phrase is just colorful Victorian exaggeration. So into the mythlocker, that one goes too. A square meal. We used to have square meals at the Naval Academy. And this one, it's served at every naval themed restaurant in the world. The claim, sailors ate off square wooden plates, so a good solid meal became a square meal meal. And sailors did sometimes use square wooden trenchers. That part's real enough. But there's no evidence the phrase comes from the plates. And a much simpler explanation was Sitting there the whole time. Square has meant honest, proper, solid, and fair for centuries. A square deal, fair and square. A square meal is just a proper, honest, solid meal. The plate is a red herring on a square plate. So into the locker. Another one. The whole nine yards. Where does this one come from? People reach for the sea on this one because a square rigger had yards. And they're the spars that hold the sails. Three masts, three yards each. Nine yards. The whole nine yards. All sail set. Sounds pretty good, but it's almost certainly not the origin. And the honest answer is more humbling. Nobody actually knows where the whole nine yards comes from. It's a genuinely unsolved etymology, and it appears surprisingly recently. 20th century theories range from machine gun belts to concrete trucks to bolts of cloth and word historians have argued about it for decades. Without a clear winner. What we can say with confidence is that it is not free mass of canvas. Sometimes the most honest entry in the mythlocker is just we don't know. And anyone who tells you they're certain is probably trying to sell you something. And here's one I don't know who let the cat out of the bag. And this is a sad one for me to say that it might be a myth, because I love it. Well, I don't love what it means, but it's just a cool kind of backstory. The story the Cat of Nine Tales, the vicious whip used for flogging sailors, was kept in a bag, and that's a red cloth bag. And to let the cat out of the bag was to bring out the whip to reveal the punishment. Come. It's very tempting, but it's probably wrong. The likelier origin is a plain old market swindle on dry land. A dishonest trader would sell you what he claimed was a suckling pig in the tide sack, and only when you got home and opened it did you discover that he'd slipped you a worthless cat instead. Let the cat out of the bag. The con is exposed. The truce is spraw. The same fair ground that gave us a pig and a Pokemon. A poke. Being a sack, the whip makes a better sea story, though, and I kind of like it. The cat in the sack is the better history, I think. And while we're here, no room to swing. A cat is generally up for debate, too. So I won't. I won't hang either side of that onion. Last one is the classic. And this was used aboard ship as a complementary term for sailor who is now natural born to the job. Or more precisely, born on the job, son of a gun. It purportedly comes from the time when women shared the gun deck accommodation with men aboard ships in port and sometimes at sea, since the working spaces and gangways had to be kept clear, the only undisturbed place a woman could give birth to a child would be behind screens between the guns. The expression also meant being conceived alongside a gun, since a hammock wasn't convenience for that sort of thing. It's vivid, it's often repeated, and it's very thinly supported. The documentary evidence for babies being officially recorded this way. It's pretty thin, however. The following is an extract from the captain's log of a Royal Navy brig sailing off the Spanish coast in 1835. So listen to this. This day, the surgeon informed me that a woman on board had been laboring in child for 12 hours and asked if I could fire a broadside to leeward. I did so, and she was delivered a fine male child. Well, truth or fiction? I'll let you be the judge, but I like the cut of this story's jib, so it's good enough for me. And we'll close the MythLocker there, though I promise you, it's nowhere near empty. Those myths are everywhere. And here's something considering kind of where this podcast came from, it might make you smile a bit. The sea spent 300 years seeding our language with its troubles and the and then in the 20th century, a brand new frontier opened up the air. And I went and did exactly the same thing. But this is why it's important for this podcast. Aviation didn't start from a blank page. When the first airmen needed words, they reached straight up and stole the sailor's colorful language. I mean, think about it. An aircraft has a cabin and a crew and a captain and a galley. You go aboard airplane. The crew works off the hangar deck of a carrier. The thing has bulkheads. You navigate. And to this day, an airplane speed is measured in knots, a unit invented by sailors throwing a knotted rope over the back of a ship. The air, linguistically, was colonized by the sea, and I'll admit a personal stake in this one. I spent a career as a naval aviator flying off his ships, which is the exact hinge where these two vocabularies meet. We took airplanes and landed them on the deck of a ship, the quarter deck and the cockpit, in a single logbook. So let me show you a few of the words the air has been quietly slipping into your sentences, some borrowed from my old friend the Sea and some brand new. Every aircraft has a flight envelope and it really is a graph. Plot its limits. How fast can it go, how high, how hard can you turn it before the wings come off? That boundary line is the envelope. And the test pilot's whole job was to fly out to that line and lean on it, to push the envelope and find the edge without going over it, because going over it was frequently fatal. Tom Wolf carried the phrase into the wider language. And now anyone who stretches a limit is pushing the envelope. Wolf gave us the other one in the same breath, the right stuff, that ineffable quality separating the pilot who comes home from the one who doesn't. Information. Flying the wingman is the pilot who flies off the leader's wing, slightly back, slightly to the side, and whose entire job is to guard the leader's blind spot. He watches the sky. The leader can't see. He's the one who's got your back, by definition. So when your friend is your wingman for the evening, that's the deal. He's flying off your wing, watching the angles. You can't. There was a certain 1986 fighter pilot movie that did the phrase no harm at all. There's three flight conditions that became three states of mind. Tailspin, nose dive and the holding pattern. A spin is a vicious, rotating, falling leaf descent that early pilots genuinely feared. So an emotional tailspin is a life spiraling down and of control. A nose dive is a sleep plunge straight at the ground, so your stocks or your mood can nose dive. And the holding pattern is the great oval that aircraft fly, stacked up over a busy airport, circling and circling, waiting for clearance to land, which is exactly what it feels like when your project or your relationship is stuck in a holding pattern, going round and round, cleared for nothing. Now, radar came out of the Second World War a way to see ships and aircraft you couldn't see with your eyes. And almost immediately, it gave us two of the most useful metaphors in modern English. To be on someone's radar is to be noticed, tracked and taken into account. And to fly under the radar is to drop low enough, literally beneath the beam, to slip in undetected. We use both constantly now, usually about office politics rather than incoming bombers. And here's a bit of a rhyme with the first half of our episode. The sailors had their flags and their colors to signal distress. The new airmen, they needed something for the radio. A single word, unmistakable, that meant, we are going down, we need help. And in the 1920s, a radio officer at a London airport Coined it. He took the French mayday. That's M, V, A, I, D, E, Z. Help me. And he Anglicized it into a word you could shout three times and never confuse for anything else. May Day. Same instinct that gave the sea its true colors. A new technology, a new century. And another scrap of French smuggled into English by people in serious trouble. So a quick burst from the cockpit radio. When a pilot says Roger, he just means received. I got your message. And it comes from old radio voice procedure. The letter R stood for received. And in the phonetic Alphabet of the day. Back then, R was Roger, Roger. So roger that is just R for recede. Its cousin, Wilco, is shorthand for will comply. I heard you, and I'll do it. And pull chocks. The chocks are the wedges jammed against the wheels to stop a parked aircraft rolling off on its own. Pull them and you're free to taxi. Pull chocks. Let's get out of here, guys. And to land us, to bail out is to take your parachute and jump from a doomed aircraft. And from there it became what a government does for a failing bank. Though I'll point out the cross link because it's too good. Bail is also what you do to a boat that's filling with water. You bail it out. The sea and the air bailing each other out across two centuries. And from the dawn of air combat in the First World War, we keep two more. An ace was a fighter pilot with five confirmed victories. So an ace is now anyone brilliant at their craft. And a dogfight was the wheeling knife fight tangle of fighters at close range. So any vicious too close contest, an election, a price war, it's called a dogfight. So the pattern just repeats. A dangerous, intensely verbal new trade is born that builds a razor sharp vocabulary. Because lives depend on the right word at the right second. And then a generation later, those words drift quietly ashore into the speech of people who will never go near the thing. The sea did it over three centuries. The air did it in a single lifetime, in my lifetime. And it did half of it wearing the sea's old clothes. Give another hundred years and our great grandchildren will say a bad plan never got off the launch pad and that everything's A okay. Or count down from 10 with no more idea they're calling the rocket man than we have when we say we're three sheets to the wind. So whether your trouble runs on seawater or on jet fuel, the language reaches for the same place. So let's come back into harbor with two of my Favorites because they are about hope. The first is in the offing. The offing was the stretch of open sea you could still see from the shore, distant but in sight. A ship in the offing had been sighted from land and was expected to come in soon. So when they say a thing is in the offing, a promotion, a change, good news, we mean it the way a family on the quay meant it. Watching for sale, not yet here, but visible and coming. It's one of the most hopeful little phrases in the language, and it's a lookouts word. And the second one is plain sailing, and it's got a real nice twist in it. It was very likely plain sailing to begin with, P L A N E instead of what we now say, which is P L A I n. So the plane sailing was a method of navigation that treated a small patch of the curved earth as if it were a flat plane. To keep the arithmetic simple, plane sailing was the easy, uncomplicated way to work out your course. Over time, the spelling drifted to plain P L A I n and the meaning settled into what we use now. Smooth, straightforward, no complications from a navigator shortcut to it'll be plain sailing from here. So here's where we fetched up. The next time you tell someone you're feeling under the weather or that your week's been chock a block or that your boss is a loose cannon, the next time you take a different tack, give a difficult personal wide berth or just try to stay on an even keel, I want you to hear the rigging in it, the creak of rope, the slap of water on a wooden hull. Three centuries of men 100ft up a dark shouting the right word for the right rope. And behind them now, a single century of airmen doing the very same thing at 500 knots, they're still aboard. They never left. They just slipped quietly into our ordinary sentences and they stowed away. And we've been carrying them around in our mouths ever since, every one of us landlubbers, all three seats to the wind in a language built by sailors. And on that note, it's the end of the watch. You can pipe down because we're done. So that's all for now, and thank you for listening to the history that happened before the history you know. If you enjoyed this episode, there's more in the offing, so follow the show, leave us a review and please give it a like and a share and support your National Naval Aviation Museum and the Museum Foundation. Until next time, this is Lucky signing off.