Tag Archive for ship

A By-and-Large Day

June 13, 2018 Comments Off on A By-and-Large Day

I’m feeling word-ish today. Which means that you get some (what I think is interesting) background on a phrase we hear often, “by and large.”

Would you believe that the common expression “by and large” was originally a nautical term? “Large” meant that the wind was to a ship’s back as it sailed (a good thing), and “full and by” meant that the ship was headed into the wind (not good). “By and large” indicated that the ship was sailing through changing, unpredictable winds that hit them from varying directions. Somehow that came to mean what it does today in common usage–“for the most part” or “all things considered.”

So, dear readers, I wish you a day that is, by and large, not by and large.

 

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Balls on Brass Monkeys

September 29, 2017 Comments Off on Balls on Brass Monkeys

Stop teetering guiltily in public when you hear the term “cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey.”  It doesn’t refer to what you think it does.  Here’s a bit of American trivia for a ho-hum Friday:

In the days when sailing ships ruled the ocean, freighters and war ships were armed with cannons. Problem was, how to keep a good supply of round cannon balls from rolling around the moving ship’s deck and keep them in a small spot near the canon?

Someone came up with a stacking pattern: 16 balls on the bottom, with 9 on top of them, then one on the top. It worked–except that the bottom row kept wanting to slide out from under the upper rows.  So they added an iron plate, called a “Monkey,” to that lower row.

Then there was the problem of rust, which iron loves to do. Obviously, the answer was to make the plate out of brass rather than iron. Thus, the term “brass monkey.”

Here comes another problem: when it’s cold, brass contracts a lot more than iron, often so much that the cannon balls would fall right out of the plates’ indentations and roll right out.

And that’s how we ended up with “cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey.”

Winter is coming.  Maybe you’ll be able to use this expression soon in polite company.

 

 

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To Lighten Up, I’ll “Break the Ice”

April 9, 2014 Comments Off on To Lighten Up, I’ll “Break the Ice”

After two very serious days of blogs, I need to lighten up a bit.  To do so, I offer another origin of an often-used phrase, “break the ice,” meaning, of course, to do something when meeting a person to help get over that first discomfort, shyness, or embarrassment, to break through a feeling of formality.

The phrase came from the 18th century, when ice-breaking ships were invented to clear a path through the ice in a river so that harsh weather didn’t prevent trade.  Because of these ships, which broke through to the Polar regions, people were able to communicate with and get to know people the ice had prevented contact with previously.

[For you pedants, this is known as a “dead metaphor”–a comparison that has been used so often that nobody remembers the comparison, or metaphor.]

 

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