Can you believe that another year has come and gone? Aye matie, the 19th of September is officially ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’! To help you participate more fully and to continue my tradition, I’d like to tell you about some common (and uncommon) phrases that come from the sea.
By Captain Ray
Published: September, 2010
On a full-rigged ship (a ship with at least three masts, all square rigged), there were over 250 different pieces of running rigging, lines that were adjustable and used to control the sails. When a seaman apprentice had learned the function and location of all of these lines, he earned his promotion to seaman, because he “knew the ropes.”
Sometimes all of us are trapped by unforeseen circumstances. An example of this for sailors is when they anchor in water so shallow that, when the tide goes out, the vessel is left “high and dry.”
One definition of a barge is a powerless vessel used to carry cargo. They can be towed alongside or behind, pushed ahead, or (in the past) towed through canals by horses, mules, and sometimes, even people walking on the canal bank’s towpath. Because they were unwieldy and difficult to control, they were often involved in collisions. By extension, any person who creates an unwelcome and surprising interruption can be said to “barge in.”
During the age of sail, the guns aboard naval vessels were not very accurate and it was necessary to get close to the enemy in order for them to be effective. In order to avoid being fired upon while “under the guns” of their foes, they would fly the ensign of a neutral country and were said to be operating under “false colors.”
The guns aboard a naval vessel in the late 1700s and early 1800s were massive things. A small ‘6 pounder’ (the approximate weight of the shot) weighed more than half a ton and a ’32 pounder’ could weigh as much as two and one half tons. Imagine the chaos and destruction if one of these guns was to break loose from its tackles and begin careening about the ship as it rolled in the waves—hence the term “loose cannon” for anyone dangerous and out of control.
While on the subject of a ship’s guns, here’s one more expression for you. The cannonballs were stacked in pyramids alongside the guns on a brass plate called a monkey. (Although cannonball is a commonly used term, it is incorrect on two counts because the ship’s guns were always referred to as guns, never cannons, and the balls were properly called shot.) Long periods of cold weather would cause the metals to contract at different rates, which would disrupt the neatly stacked balls, thereby causing them to fall off the monkey and roll about the deck. It was said to be cold enough to “freeze the balls off a brass monkey.” There is no written proof of the origin of this expression, but it is just risqué enough to have survived in our colloquial speech, with most folks not knowing its less prurient origin.
Ray Wichmann, is a US SAILING-certified Ocean Passagemaking Instructor, a US SAILING Instructor Trainer, and a member of US SAILING’s National Faculty. He holds a 100-Ton Master’s License, was a charter skipper in Hawai’i for 15 years, and has sailed on both coasts of the United States, in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Greece. He is presently employed as the Master Instructor at OCSC Sailing in the Berkeley Marina.
