Square-Rigger Relics in American Speech
FOR several years I have been collecting antiques along an entirely new line. The items are all nautical, but, unlike contemporary relics roped in by our American Wings, mine are far from being museum pieces. On the contrary, they are performing active service at the present time. Their antiquity varies. Some date from Elizabeth’s admirals. Others echo back to the whalers and clippers of our own Sea King era. But their vitality is a constant. Lifted from their decks to be appropriated by landlubbers, they snugged down to unaccustomed weather, and have outridden the storms of competition. The best substitutes that mass production has offered fail to impair their distribution. They are still in popular demand and going strong.
To date, the collection numbers seventytwo items, all of which were picked up as dropped by their users. In no instance were these antiques engaged in their seafaring business. They were serving solely as figures of speech in chance conversation, and were obviously rated as up-to-date. Here is a sample exhibit, presented, as the movie producers say in animated motion: —
Oil our way down town a pessimistic friend confides his belief that the world has Tost its bearings,’ and must ‘take a new departure’ or find itself on its ‘beam ends.’ We admit that the going is ‘rough’ and wonder if America is wise to fight war-debt cancellations to the ‘bitter end.’ At the office we ‘overhaul’ our schedule to get ‘abreast’ of our correspondence, and decide to ‘back water’ with the ‘crank ’ in Chicago. He may be only a ‘figurehead,’ but why keep at ‘loggerheads’ with him? So we give him some more ‘leeway’ and let the matter ‘ride.’
‘Fagged out’ by trying to straighten out a ‘hitch’ in what seemed ‘plain sailing,’ we go home and turn the ‘gadget’ on the radio. The announcer orders us to ‘stand by.’ We obey, and ‘get a new slant’ on a ‘slush fund’ unearthed by the latest investigating committee. ‘Is anybody “on the square?” ’ we demand indignantly of the wife. She admits being ‘taken aback’ by the disclosures. ‘“Mark” my words,’ we oraclize, ‘they have only begun to “open things up.”’ With that we ‘turn in.’ Next morning the newspaper tells us that Investigator Seaworthy is being ‘ boomed ’ for president.
The above exhibit contains twenty-six phrases lifted bodily from the fo’c’sles of the forties. Unchanged in sheer or rig, after nearly a century they are as negotiable as nickels in a subway booth. But in addition to staging this phenomenon, which it seems to me is significant in itself, the metaphors have an intrinsic interest. Many of them require no explanation. ‘Lost its bearings’ and ‘to take a new departure’ tell their own story, but ‘bitter end’ has been befogged. In spite of the ‘bitter,’ the phrase has nothing to do with the dregs in a medicine glass. It was the name given to the length of anchor cable left inboard before it was made fast to the bitts. Along with the hook, it was the ship’s ‘back against the wall’ in the face of weather and tide.
‘Crank,’ which is becoming rather obsolete, is a sea term applied to a craft that was unstable because of its build, or its poorly stowed ballast or cargo, or both. You can take your choice according to your experience. ‘At loggerheads’ descends straight from New England’s whaling fleets. The loggerhead was a bitt in the stern of a whaleboat to which the harpoon line could be made fast after the whale had been struck. It acted like the brake on a fishing reel. So to be at loggerheads is to be engaged in a tug of war with a whale. ‘ Let it ride’ has been worn smooth by popular employment, and perhaps logically. When a ship has fallen back to the scope of her anchor cable, the mate sings out, ‘Let her ride!’ He means that no further manœuvring is necessary and Jack can turn in.
As for ‘fagged out,’ how many shoppers use that phrase daily? In square-rigger lingo, when a rope’s end strands got untwisted, the rope was unfit for service. It was fagged out, and rewinding and knotting the strands was a one-man job requiring skill and patience. ‘Slant’ is an unexpected gift of favorable wind in the doldrums. To get a slant on a proposition is sometimes the same to a tired business man. ‘Slush fund’ is another gem in my collection. In the 1812 navy, ‘slush’ was the grease drippings saved up by the ship’s cook and deposited in the slush bucket. By analogy sailors called odd change collected for a specific purpose the ‘slush fund.’ The grease was used to oil the masts and rigging; the fund to provide entertainment and extras. No further comment is needed.
Space will not permit me to plot the meaning of the rest of the exhibit, but ‘boomed’ is too precious an item to neglect. There seems to be no record of who first used it in its present meaning, but I have added it to my collection as watchmate to ‘slush fund.’ In the windjamming days, as now, speed was all-important. To get it, the skippers ran out spars to right and left of the regular yards and bent sail to them. The sails were pronounced ‘stunsels,’ and the operation was known as ‘booming’ her. Its purpose and process were so similar to American standard practice in several lines that, like ‘slush fund,’ the fate of the phrase was inevitable. It was negotiable loot, waiting for an imaginative landsman to lift it into the language and make it immortal.
The aptness of these seafaring phrases accounts, of course, for their original splicing into alien lines. Besides, the times were ripe for their recognition. But this does not explain their vitality. The ships and seamen that fathered them have been spurlos versenkt for seven decades, but the relics continue to be prosperous and busy. No other lode has yielded such metal. The farm, the power plants, the motor age, and the airplane have struck off some dependable coins, but none of their issues compete with the popularity of the square-rigger doubloons.
Why do they persist so valiantly? Can it be that they are outcroppings from America’s subconscious memory of that astounding half century when the infant Columbia, snatching the world’s sea trade from under the nose of Britannia, was hailed as the Gem of the Ocean? I am afraid that James Truslow Adams would not agree to that diagnosis, for neither he nor his fellow reckoners have plotted that landfall on their charts of our national voyage. Yet the symptoms seem to indicate that when America talks at ease she turns her face, like Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, to the open sea. It is here that the significance of these relics may lurk. Anyway, I am willing to donate the use of my collection to the next navigator who logs the course of our Ship of State. It may help to clarify his reckoning.
NATHANIEL S. OLDS