Many expressions we use come from the nautical domain. But are they nautical? Are they really? We’ve got Chase Dalton from the US Naval History Podcast to shine a light on some of these expressions, and in some cases reveal the secret nautical origins of words we use every day.
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sources
Which English expressions have a nautical origin?
including CANOE, the Committee to Ascribe a Naval Origin to Everything
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/nautical-phrases.html
World Wide Words by Michael Quinion
https://www.worldwidewords.org/genindex.htm
Phrase Finder by Gary Martin
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/phrases-and-sayings-list.html
wordhistories.net by Pascal Tréguer
https://wordhistories.net/alphabetical-index/
Grammarphobia blog with Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman
https://www.grammarphobia.com
A Way with Words with Grant Barrett and Martha Barnett
https://www.waywordradio.org
wheelhouse
What Does ‘in Your Wheelhouse’ Mean? | Grammar Girl
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/articles/what-does-in-your-wheelhouse-mean/
Are you in our wheelhouse? | Grammarphobia
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2014/01/wheelhouse.html
pipe down
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Pipe down’? | The Phrase Finder
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/283600.html
grog
grogram (n.) | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/word/grog#etymonline_v_14294
cut of someone’s jib
What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘Cut of your jib’? | The Phrase Finder
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/cut-of-your-jib.html
cockpit
Why is an airplane’s cockpit called that? | Jim Gordon’s answer on Quora
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-a-cockpit-called-a-cockpit/answer/Jim-Gordon
log
The History Of The Captain’s Log | A Pirate’s Portal
https://apiratesportal.com/2012/10/14/the-captains-log/
Chip log | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_log
keelhaul
Keelhauling — Torture By Being Dragged on Ship’s Bottom | Medium
https://medium.com/frame-of-reference/keelhauling-torture-by-being-dragged-on-ships-bottom-4313a4e21b2
booty
Looking at ‘Booty’ (The word) | Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/booty-word-history
landlubber
lubber (n.) | Online Etymology Dictionary
https://www.etymonline.com/word/lubber
under weigh / way
‘Underway’ or ‘under way’? | Grammarphobia
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/02/underway-or-under-way.html
freebooter
Washington Talk: Senate; Age of TV Catches Up With an Anachronism
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/25/us/washington-talk-senate-age-of-tv-catches-up-with-an-anachronism.html
son of a gun
CONTENT WARNING: This is the spurious version of the story
Son of a Gun | Ginger Software
https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/phrases/son-of-a-gun/
What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘Son of a gun’?
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/son-of-a-gun.html
brass monkey
What Does A Brass Monkey Really Have To Do With Cold Weather?
https://973thedawg.com/what-does-a-brass-monkey-really-have-to-do-with-cold-weather/
Brass monkey (colloquialism) | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_monkey_(colloquialism)
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Hedvig: There’s a cat though.
Daniel: Oh, is there a cat? Hello, Cat. That is Cement. Now, you haven’t met Cement.
Chase: Well, hello.
Daniel: Cement is getting away.
Chase: It’s good luck to have a cat aboard a ship.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: I can imagine, keeping pests under control.
Chase: Yeah, keep the rats away.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Yeah, she would love that. She keeps our balcony free from bugs.
Chase: Okay.
Daniel: Oh, very good.
Hedvig: Yeah.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. And with me now, someone who is well known as a bit of a loose cannon. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: [pause] A… am I well known to be a loose cannon?
[laughter]
Daniel: Well, no, not really. But I was looking through the list of idioms and that one popped out. So, I thought I would just get your reaction, spontaneous.
Hedvig: Okay. All right. Well, okay.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: I think Ben is the loose cannon, and he’s unfortunately not here today.
Daniel: He’s not, he’s feeling a bit under the weather. All week long, he was taking a pile of schoolchildren to a camp, which is just… I think, he deserves a medal for bravery there. But he’s not feeling too well, so he couldn’t join us today. But he will be here, I’m sure, on a future episode.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: So, here to help us out, is a very special cohost. It’s Chase Dalton of the US Naval History Podcast. Hey, Chase, thanks for joining us.
Chase: Hey, Dan. Hey, Hedvig. How are you guys doing?
Daniel: Doing good.
Hedvig: I’m all right. Can I ask the question on behalf of our listeners of Chase?
Chase: Absolutely.
Hedvig: Are you a historian, a military man, or both?
Chase: I am a very poor historian and a former military man.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Okay, good.
Chase: Yes, I went to the Naval Academy many years ago, and then I served in the Navy for six years. During my time in the Navy, I read a lot of naval history books and slowly started regaling some of the sailors that that I worked with, with some naval history factoids, and that developed into a passion which I eventually on my second deployment started writing these down in a coherent fashion, and that became the first couple episodes of the US Naval History Podcast. And after I got out, it became a COVID project when I was locked away, nothing better to do and produce the first couple, and turns out some people liked it.
Daniel: There are a bunch but I found that yours is very entertaining and well researched.
Chase: [chuckles] Thank you. Yeah, it’s not a deep dive into the specific battles and events and the more of just an era-by-era overview that I try to my best to connect, A, keep it entertaining, but also tie it to the modern era and some larger themes of history. We’re almost at the modern day and sort of broaching into the modern day. I’m going to talk a little bit about today’s navies with the challenges, the force is facing, and specifically in Asia and the Pacific with the rise of the somewhat colloquially named People’s Liberation Army, navy, aka China’s navy.
Daniel: They like doing that with the names.
Chase: Yeah, I wonder if it makes more sense in Chinese.
Daniel: Possibly.
Hedvig: I think it does. And it is the army that won the Civil War.
Chase: True. And it was the Navy that or the US Navy, I should say that stopped them from finishing off the nationalist just 110 miles across the Taiwan Strait.
Daniel: We decided we were going to get together and tackle some expressions in English that are nautical, or maybe naut, because Chase and I were just doing some groundwork for this episode. And there’s this idea of CANOE, the Committee to Ascribe a Nautical Origin to Everything.
Hedvig: What?
Daniel: Many expressions are thought to be nautical, but in fact, are not nautical.
Chase: In fact, so bad that I was going through some of the books that I had read just general naval history, and often they’ll have a little anecdote section about, “Oh, and this phrase and this phrase comes from a nautical origin,” and I sort of remembered where they were, and I went and found them again in my large bookshelf of naval history and turns out that several of them are wrong. The authors have been incorrectly educating their audiences this for many years.
Hedvig: Well, what is reality? Dear listener, in this episode, I’m going to take the stance of the slightly communist postmodern European, which I am hoping is going to provide a good counterpoint to my fellow people on this show. What is reality, really? Isn’t it just what we agree on? And if we agree that something… Yeah, etc., Expect this.
Daniel: I’m ready.
Chase: I personally think we’re The Sims 37. But hey, you know.
[laughter]
Daniel: We often say, “Oh, this appears to be a nautical…” or people say this is a nautical origin but it’s secretly not. A few weeks ago, when I was teaching a class for adults, I told them about this CANOE thing, the Committee to Ascribe a Nautical Origin to Everything, and how it’s usually not nautical. Over the course of that lecture, I like to look up stuff, like somebody will say, “What about this word or this phrase?” I will look it up, and I’ll have maybe the Oxford English Dictionary or some other websites on the screen behind me. And so help me, four or five times, it would say Chiefly Nautical [laughs] and just for random words that were coming up. So, I think there are some sneaky nautical phrases that we might not expect.
Hedvig: Okay. All right, I’ll be willing to accept that. We’ll see how the rest goes.
Daniel: Okay.
Chase: We’ll see if I’ve heard of some of these sneaky ones or not.
Daniel: Okay. Now, this episode is a special bonus patron edition for us. However, it’s going to be a regular episode for the US Naval History Podcast. So, that’ll be interesting. That’ll move some traffic around. For our patrons, we’ve got a special message, a couple of special messages. Our yearly mailout is coming soon. Every patron will be getting a few choice items from us in their actual physical mailbox. Not your digital mailbox, your analog mailbox. So, please make sure that Patreon has your correct address. Also, we have going now our Word of the Week of the Year. We take all the Words of the Week that are running around from all our episodes this year, we scrape them together, we slap them on to Twitter, we slap them on Facebook. People can vote by liking them. A few candidates are emerging as favourites. So, please go and vote. Hunt us down, we’re @becauselangpod on all the socials. We’ll be announcing the results on a live episode to which all patrons are invited. So, watch our socials and watch our Discord for that information, you can join us. We’re really looking forward to that.
Hedvig: And it’s like Word of the Year that all these dictionaries and other institutions do but better, because it’s our listeners, and our listeners are the best part of the population.
Daniel: They’re really on top of things.
Chase: Do you guys care to pre-tip the scales and declare an inside favorite? Or are you going to leave that up to the audience?
Hedvig: We have chatted about it, and Daniel has told me one thing that’s winning that I really like but I think I don’t want to bias the vote.
Daniel: I’m hoping that I’ll see your -USSY… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No. Shush.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Also, that is never going to happen.
Daniel: Well, that’s why I chose to save that one because I thought nobody’s going to go… Everyone hates that one. So, you know…
Hedvig: Everyone hates that one. I try to say sometimes for fun.
Chase: I love that [crosstalk] got bandwagon.
Daniel: [laughs] Exactly.
Hedvig: Oh, no.
Daniel: I will say that for that episode, our Discord friends are going to bring their favourite words, and there have been a few popping up. And it is Word of the Year season. We just love Word of the Year season. It’s so much fun. Now, let me ask a question, you two, we’re going to try to make some calls as to whether an expression is nautical or is not nautical. But how would we know the difference? Is it just as simple as picking a few good websites. Or making a guess? Flinging a dart at a dartboard? How do you know?
Chase: Probably earliest recorded usage, if it first appears in a nautical-related book or a play or whatever written source we have, and it’s specifically ascribed a nautical source or within maybe a year or two. That’s a laypersons guess. But is there a better answer that I’m missing here?
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: No.
Chase: [laughs]
Daniel: That’s in my notes. You check the original appearances in print, and if it has nothing to do with ships, then there’s your answer.
Hedvig: That said, as with all etymology, we often can’t go much further back. They’re usually about the 1500s for Germanic languages. If it’s Latin or something, then we can go further back. But if it’s like English or German or something, usually 1500s is about the knockoff for most major text collections. And lo and behold, people spoke languages before the 1500s, and that word might have shifted from one origin to another by the point it was first recorded. So, when we say nautical in origin, we mean nautical, as early as 1500s probably, but it could be earlier. Hey, maybe all language stems from like…
Chase: The sea.
Hedvig: The sea.
Chase: The sea.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Chase: For… [crosstalk]
Daniel: We just pick up words and use them again.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I think we’ll see a few of those.
Chase: So, how often does it happen? If ever that we think we know the origin of a word, and then someone finds or digitizes a manuscript and somehow it gets picked up, and it’s like, “Oh, in fact, we completely misunderstood the origins of the word. In fact, we had been ascribing it to a morphed meaning.” Does that happen frequently at all anymore?
Hedvig: I don’t hear that frequently, but there are a lot of words, and there is not a news feed alerting all linguists as soon as this happens.
Daniel: Well, if you follow message boards, like especially the American Dialect Society, they do keep track of antedatings. They get really excited when a phrase gets antedated. “Oh, I found this term, and it’s older than we thought.” And then, that changes. And then, it gets added to maybe the Oxford English Dictionary or other places. So, antedatings do happen.
Hedvig: But it’s like, “Oh, we found an earlier occurrence of this word,” but not like with a different meaning and a different origin. It’s usually just like the same thing we already had but older, right?
Chase: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: It doesn’t happen very often that we completely flip our understanding of a word or phrase on its head. But, like you said, Hedvig, words start getting used… like a hood, if you look under a hood, back in the Middle Ages, you find a monk. And if you look under a hood, now you find an engine. So, things do change over time. I will say that you mentioned the 1500s, Hedvig, that is an interesting time for language and in history, because that’s when we start seeing… correct me if I’m wrong, Chase, but we see nautical dominance, worldwide shipping going on. If it’s much later than that, if an expression starts in the 1800s, and people claim it’s nautical, is there a time when nautical dominance, nautical things were so much in the public imagination, that that would have been the time and if it’s later than that, then it’s too late to be nautical?
Chase: So, if I were to hazard a random guess, I would say that while the 1500 is really when ocean-going expeditions became a big thing…
Hedvig: For Europeans.
Chase: Right. Well, I mean, the technology largely did not exist, even outside of the European context for large scale… The Polynesians were certainly doing it, but in terms of…
Hedvig: I was going to say, all of Pacific was settled 3000 years earlier.
Chase: Right.
Hedvig: And they kept voyaging.
Chase: I meant that in terms of large-scale trading, ships large enough to do regular back and forth of…
Hedvig: I think it’s volume we’re looking for.
Chase: A volume and then…
Hedvig: Not speed or frequency, yeah.
Chase: There’s a lot of historians who would argue that one of the main things that caused the development of the modern nation states starting in Spain, and Portugal and France, as we understand it, today is ocean-going trade, and then you need to protect this ocean-going trade because it’s so valuable, making so much money, and you need to have a navy. But a navy is just ungodly expensive and it’s logistically so hard to do, and you need to develop some bureaucracy and some centralization. That spurs the estate and becomes sort of a virtuous cycle. And then, England gets in on it, and they dominate, the Dutch and the various powers evolved the modern, bureaucratic, centralized nation state as understood in the western world today because of trade.
And that all stems from the very late 1400s to mid-1500s, and Christopher Columbus, and the Portuguese slightly around that, figured out that you can go around the southern tip of Africa, Cape of Good Hope, and reach India. And it turns out, there’s a bunch of stuff that previously had been blocked by or heavily tariffed or inefficiently extracted through the Ottoman Empire via land, and that this was really profitable, and navies expanded via that process of protecting trade.
But going back to the origin of words, I wonder if in more Romance-focused languages, that perhaps many of the origins go back farther to the Roman time because the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, I think, [unintelligible [00:14:16] the Romans had extensive trade and the empire could not have been sustained without trade because Rome itself would have starved to death thousands times over, had they not been able to bring grain en masse from Egypt and trade throughout the Mediterranean. And they’re mostly navigating via coastline, but they were doing some cross Mediterranean trade as well. And so, I wonder if, in some of the Romance languages, a lot of that terminology goes back to the Roman era because there was extensive, extensive Mediterranean seaborne trade network.
Daniel: So, if I said 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, prime nautical territory, 1800s a little late or is that wrong?
Chase: I mean, I think that if you were to look at a graph of people that did ocean going voyages and value of trade and volume of trade, it would just be an exponential curve up until today starting, call it, 1490 or so 1450. Today, I don’t think that exponential curve breaks anywhere quite frankly.
Daniel: Okay, great. Good to know. That’s going to influence my choices here.
Hedvig: We should add to the historical record that when we say trade, we are talking about trade of valuable things, like spices and things, but we’re also talking about brutal extortion of people and the transportation of slaves. Even when it’s not the transportation of slaves, the extortion of people through this trade. My husband’s reading a book right now about the British East India Company. And it’s, hmm, interesting times.
Daniel: For a several centuries there’s a unfortunate aspect of trade and really one that that enabled it because the Europeans, through a combination of policy and disease, wiped out the native population, and you need someone to go produce the trading goods that are being sent back to Europe in [unintelligible 00:16:22] convenient source just looks out and then that created tens of millions of lives immiserated in over the course of the next 300 odd years or so.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I would like to also in addition to looking for the first instance of a word or a phrase, there are some reliable websites that I think are especially reliable. Can I just name some and maybe you can name yours? The Oxford English Dictionary who sponsors the show, World Wide Words by Michael Quinion, The Phrase Finder by Gary Martin, wordhistories.net by Pascal Trégue. I think that the Grammarphobia blog with Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman is quite good. Mental Floss uses different authors. I quite like them, and also A Way with Words with Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette. So, those are some sources that I tend to trust. Anymore that I missed?
Chase: Crickets.
Daniel: Okay, great.
Chase: [laughs]
Daniel: We’ll put a link to those on our website, becauselanguage.com. Now, we started off by asking our friends on Discord to name some of their favourite maritime expressions, or are they? Let’s get started. Ariaflame starts us off by saying, “I mentioned ‘in their wheelhouse’ I think at some point,” she wanted to know about wheelhouse, yeah or nah? What is a wheelhouse?
Hedvig: Isn’t that for a mill that’s attached to a creek?
Daniel: Can be.
Chase: Wouldn’t that be a mill?
[laughs]
Hedvig: No, because you can have it with wind.
Daniel: Yes, that’s right. That is one use of wheelhouse that has been used in history. Once again, we talked about how words get used for one thing and then picked up and changed and changed and changed. So, that’s one usage. When do we see that version of wheelhouse? Just going to check because I didn’t save of that.
Chase: So, I know in a nautical sense, a wheelhouse is the pilot house. You generally would not say at least on a navy vessel, “go to the wheelhouse,” but I would understand what someone meant because there is a literal wheel that you would say pilothouse where there’s, A, the wheel, but also the helmsman would work, the bosun mates, mates and the quartermasters. And essentially, where the primary driving location of the ship is usually up high where there’s a good view because it’s hard to beat the mark on eyeball for a lot of things when navigating over the high seas. But as I understand it, with some preliminary research, that is actually while it is a very old usage, calling the pilot house a wheelhouse is not the original.
Daniel: It’s close. According to Oxford, they collapsed those two into one. There’s a structure enclosing a large wheel. So, it could be a waterwheel, could be a steering wheel. 1835 is the first instance, and it is… Oh, wait, no.
Hedvig: 1835? That’s quite late.
Chase: I’ve got an 1808.
Daniel: We got to go back. 1808, a building in which cartwheels are stored. That’s the wheelhouse, so that’s the earliest. But then, the water wheelhouse and the steering wheelhouse appear to be pretty contemporaneous.
Hedvig: Isn’t this just good fashion Germanic compounding? The ways that English has lost. All of these people are like, “We have a wheel, we have a building where that is, it’s a wheelhouse.” And all of them maybe independently started using this term because you have a mill by a creek, you have a wheel in the house, your wheelhouse. You have a steering wheel in a room. And then, the cartwheel seemed to be like the most… how do you say? The most wheelie wheel out of those three?
Daniel: The most prototypical wheel.
Hedvig: Because that’s the one that’s actually used for transportation, like a wheel, like on a cart. Whereas the steering wheel and the mill one are analogs of that.
Daniel: Yeah, maybe a bit less so. I notice also that there’s a couple of more usages of wheelhouse. The wheelhouse in baseball from 1959. The area that you’ve got to get the ball into when the batter is trying to hit it with a cricket bat.
Hedvig: Oh, the wicket.
Daniel: Sorry, did I say baseball… sports ball. I meant to say sports ball.
Chase: Sports ball, there we go.
Daniel: This is not a sports podcast.
Hedvig: Wicket is my favourite cricket term. It means like three or four different things.
Daniel: Does it? Wait, I’m struggling.
Hedvig: Yeah, there’s the wicket, the object. There is a wicket when you do a thing. There’s a wicket that you’re standing on.
Daniel: In sports ball, that’s three different things?
Hedvig: In cricket.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Wow. Okay. I did not know that.
Hedvig: This is just from my poor British husband trying to teach me cricket, and I go, “Wait, you said that word again.” [crosstalk]
Daniel: [laughs] That’s got to be something different because ambiguity is standard in language. Look, cricket is easy. It’s just like baseball, except there’s three bases instead of four.
Chase: The games, or whatever you call them last all day long.
Daniel: That’s right.
Hedvig: And there’s cucumber sandwiches, and you can drink and hang out with your mates.
Daniel: It’s great. How fun. The wheelhouse meaning expertise comes from about 1987. The quote is, “He told me he couldn’t play reggae. Of course, he could, but it wasn’t his wheelhouse.” So, are we saying nautical? I think at least a little bit.
Hedvig: Where does that metaphor come from? Which one of the…[crosstalk]
Chase: That seems like a leap to come out of nowhere. “It’s in my wheelhouse,” I guess a wheelhouse in the sense of… a ship is that’s where you control the ship from. So perhaps…
Daniel: That is the relevant metaphor. Yes, it’s where you control the thing from so it goes from, and so. This goes from a place where you control the ship to area of skill or expertise. I can see that’s the connection there. Perhaps, not originally nautical but certainly nautical meaning joined along with other meanings at the time.
Hedvig: I would say that’s nautical. If it comes from the steering wheel on a ship wheelhouse wheelhouse, to ‘in my wheelhouse’, then that’s just straight up nautical origin to me.
Daniel: Oh, you mean like the water wheelhouse sense diverged because there’s no expertise that’s intended there.
Hedvig: Well, I was also going to say I wasn’t sure that was the case, because maybe what you have in your wheelhouse, where you have your cartwheels, is where you have the things you use.
Daniel: I mean, possibly. Oh, gosh, this is so tangly already.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, so let me amend that then. The wheelhouse, meaning the steering wheelhouse was one sense of many for wheelhouse at the time, but it’s probably the prevailing sense that gave us this idea of your area of expertise. Does that sound right?
Chase: I’d buy that. Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, let’s go to Aristemo, who mentions “Pipe down, nautical or not. What’s the story?”
Hedvig: I barely know what it means.
Daniel: “Pipe down, you kids.”
Chase: Yeah, it’s like an old man phrase, right? At least that’s how I associate it.
Daniel: “Hey, pipe down over there.”
[laughter]
Chase: Beyond the nautical.
Daniel: “Your kid with your rock and roll.”
Chase: “Get off my lawn.”
Daniel: Okay.
Chase: Have any of you guys ever heard a bosun’s mate pipe?
Hedvig: You said several words I don’t know.
Daniel: Bosun.
Chase: Bosun. I’m going to chat that over to you. Let me know if you can hear this.
[piercing whistle]
Daniel: That was quite piercing.
Chase: Right. It is quite annoying, especially when you are being woken up by it. Or in the case of pipe down, it is the signal to… well, really, it’s a signal to pay attention to what’s going on the 1MC, the ship-wide announcement circuit. And if I were running a ship, I don’t think I would have that, despite the nautical tradition associated with it. But pipe down, at least in the naval context, there’s a specific piercing whistle from the bosun’s pipe that would signify the announcement that the ship is going into night mode. No one really ever goes fully to sleep because you have to maintain watch 24/7 but we do have a rough day and night on the ship. And after that, announcements are supposed to be minimized. I would imagine that in the days of sail, when we didn’t have radars and whatnot to man, that would be somewhat even more significant, go put out the lights, get in your [unintelligible 00:24:33] something like that. That is the naval origin of it. The bosuns take great pride in being good bosun’s pipe downers. When someone really messes one up in front of the whole ship on the 1MC, it is the cause of, I’m sure, some ribbing in the bosun’s locker.
Hedvig: I have a question for Daniel. Thank you, Chase, we learned about bosun’s pipe and piping, and pipe down means the whole ship goes into lower activity mode.
Chase: Yeah, night mode, so to speak.
Hedvig: Right. But when the old man shouts up the kids, “Pipe down,” they mean, “Be quiet, stop doing things.”
Daniel: Yeah, that’s right, because when it was bedtime, the bosun would play the tune on the pipe, and the sailors would all go down to bed and be quiet. That sense of being quiet from the 1700s carried over into the 1800s, and that’s where we start seeing pipe down. That one is defs nautical. Okay, next one, “Cut of their jib,” Aristemo asks us. What about this one? Chase, what’s a jib?
Hedvig: Jib is a small… Not all ships have them, but in the days of sailing ships, the small forward, most sail on a sailing ship. The jib I have done in the past some small amount of research or learning on what the sail does. It actually doesn’t do much propelling on its own, but it has something to do with the aerodynamic properties of enabling less or more turbulence on the mainsail, therefore allowing the ship to go faster and with better control.
Daniel: Okay, so what’s this cut thing?
Hedvig: Well, the cut, as I understand it, is not so much the physical cut or the size and the shape, but if you keep it taut, because it’s useless and it’s flapping around. [onomatopoeia] What I would imagine to be the connection is the cut of your jib so that the style or perhaps how you manage the jib sail, and that would tell the viewers a lot or tell anyone looking at it a lot about the ship, A, what purpose it is, but also how well the crew was handling it, because it’s very easy for that… again, that jib sail, [onomatopoeia] if it’s not carefully attended to. I think that connects to, “I like how you look,” or, “I like how you think.”
Daniel: Or how you’re doing things or how you’re operating the ship. Yeah, okay. I see here a quote from Sir Walter Scott in 1824. I don’t know if this is the first mention, but, “If she disliked what the sailor calls the cut of their jib,” and that little sailor reference indicates that at least Sir Walter Scott at the time thought that this was a sailor. This was generally agreed to be of a nautical origin. Of course, since it is a part of a boat, then that would make sense. No disputing there but thank you for backing us up with some information about that one.
Let’s see. I want to skip over to one by Ariaflame. Oh, she’s already had one, but let’s do another one. Grog. One thing that I know about grog is that it’s related to groggy. If you drink too much grog, then you do feel groggy. I hadn’t made that connection before, so that was fun. But what do we have on grog?
Hedvig: Well, so grog in Swedish is the thing that you mix, it’s the hard liquor that you mix with something else to make a palatable drink. Vodka is a kind of grog, and you can mix that with orange juice or whatever you’re doing. Then, that other thing is called… oh, you don’t have this word, but what do you call wood… firewood, like wood that you use fire?
Daniel: Yeah, firewood.
Chase: Yeah
Hedvig: Okay, so orange juice in this scenario is grog firewood.
Daniel: Is that right?
Hedvig: Because it’s what you add to make a thing that’s valuable.
Chase: Interesting.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Like tonic water is also grog firewood.
Daniel: Okay. Now, Chase, what have you got on this one?
Chase: Grog, as I understand it, was originally sort of a Royal Navy or perhaps going back farther than that term, that was the watered-down rum that the sailors were issued as part of their ration and possibly connected to the lack of fresh water aboard, and this helped keep the level of infection down. But now, obviously, we’re not getting drunk aboard navy ships anymore. There’s no grog ration, has not been for quite a long time. Its modern usage in a naval setting would be generally a particularly nasty drink. The context you would see this is a dining out, which is this naval tradition where generally the wardroom, so the officers go out and everyone gets on their nicest uniform and brings a date. It’s very impressive. There’s a lot of fun and funny traditions associated with that. People get called out for various things they have done wrong or perceived to have done wrong, both at the ceremony and on the ship, and they are forced to go drink the grog, which is generally think about fraternity Animal House style disgusting, if they just put mayonnaise in hard liquor and whatever else…
Hedvig: Oh, witches brew.
Chase: Yeah, absolutely disgusting. You’re forced to go drink the grog, and you have to go drink a cup of it. It’s revolting having done it on several occasions.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Is navy culture just like very similar to fraternity culture?
Chase: In some ways, yes, in the sense that it’s a bunch of young men put together. I think you just get similar group dynamics. In many senses, no, in that there’s at least some semblance of order and structure and work to be done, as opposed to, I guess there’s theoretically studying to be done or. expected in fraternity, but I think the standard is much looser. I would say there are some instances, but significantly more professionalized and fewer the downsides.
Daniel: I’ve got a reference here to Old Grog, which was the nickname of someone named Edward Vernon, a British admiral. This is about 1740. He, in August 1740, ordered his sailor’s rum to be diluted. The reason his nickname was Old Grog was because he wore a grogram cloak. I’d never heard of grogram, but apparently, it’s a bit like burlap. It’s a coarse fabric. Now, is that going to fit in or does that run afoul of Hedvig’s information that there’s a Norse tie-in as well?
Hedvig: No, we could have just borrowed it. I am actually looking up the Swedish. The oldest Swedish example of grog is 1795.
Daniel: Oh, shoot. That’s way after 1740. So, that sounds totally plausible.
Hedvig: And it says, [Swedish language]. That means the crew on the certain kind of ship that I don’t know the word for in English, in the cold days, specific all afternoons, should be served hot grog, which is made from a kind of hard liquor that I don’t know the word for in English, water and brown syrup. That sounds like they’re trying to make rum because they’re adding brown syrup.
Chase: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. He got named after the grogram that he wore, but then the grog got named after him. That’s interesting.
Hedvig: Maybe, yeah. But the other thing about alcohol on ships, so in medieval times, because water was often infested with various kinds of bacteria, you could get sick. So, all through medieval times, people would drink light alcohol, even children, because that was safer than water. It makes sense that even sailors would be trying to not get sick, especially if you have standing water in barrels, you probably got all kinds of shit going on, right?
Daniel: Yeah. All right, we’re going to say that one is nautical. Let’s go on to one by Iztin, has mentioned ‘cockpit’ as having a nautical origin. Yay or nay?
Chase: I don’t know. I only associate cockpit with aviation, and there’s certainly a lot of naval aviation, but I’m going to plead ignorance here.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: I know that cockpit is a thing on an airplane, and I think it’s a part of a ship as well.
Daniel: It is. It was applied to ships before it was applied to airplanes.
Hedvig: Yeah, I think a lot of things are. Like, you get like airplane captains and…
Daniel: Yeah, that’s the path. Right, yeah. The reason it’s called a cockpit is because it resembled the circular pit that you would induce roosters to fight each other in, which is terribly sad and not something that I like. But in photos, it really does look like a round sort of circular pit. Cockpit is what it is, and then that got applied. So, is it nautical? Not originally, but as far as the nautical usage, that certainly predates the aviation usage. So, I guess we can say that’s a yes.
I want to know about ‘captain’s log’ because this is one of Ben’s favourite things and he’s not here right now. Tell us the story of log from your perspective. Chase, if you wouldn’t mind.
Chase: A captain’s log would be more properly called today a deck log, and that is a legal document where you write down what is happening on the ship. There are certain required things and certain optional things, best practice things you would write down. As the officer of the deck, the person in charge of the pilothouse, or the wheelhouse, you have your quartermaster write stuff down. And at the end of every watch, you would sign it to verify its authenticity. This is a legal document, but ultimately the captain, the CO, retains ultimate responsibility for everything that happens on the ship. Everything. It’s a tradition that the US Navy inherited from the Royal Navy, and that would be the equivalent of a captain’s log, essentially the captain’s book of what is happening on board the ship.
Daniel: As to why they called it a log, I have the story here. It’s the story that Ben likes. What they would do when they were sailing about, they would measure the ship’s progress by throwing a log overboard, an actual wooden board or a wooden log with a rope attached to it, and then they would watch as the rope would play out. That’s how they would measure the speed. And then, they would record that speed in-
Hedvig and Chase: Knots.
Daniel: That’s right. The string had knots in it. That’s why we say that you travel at a rate of knots and we record things in a logbook. So, yes, definitely nautical.
Chase: Interesting. I had been falsely told by somebody a long time ago that that was not actually true, and I was afraid to say it. [laughs] I didn’t want to be proven wrong.
Daniel: Well, maybe it is wrong. Let’s find out. How do we find out?
Hedvig: We google. Once we’ve googled, here’s the teaching moment.
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: We look at the things we get and we google ‘captain’s log etymology’ on your husband’s computer, who has a different keyboard from you, so you misspell it. You see that the first entry, because I’m me and my husband is very similar to me as well, is about Star Trek. And you skip that one.
Daniel: Yes, you do.
Hedvig: We have logbook on Wikipedia, and logbook on Wictionary. Wictionary tends to collate a lot of… they’re not always right. They say the thing about the wooden float thing from the 1670s.
Daniel: Nobody has gainsaid it. Is it weird that the entry for Wikipedia, there’s an entry called chip log, not Ship Log. History: All nautical instruments that measure the speed of a ship through water are known as logs. This nomenclature dates back to the days of sail when sailors tossed a log attached to a rope knotted at regular intervals off the stern of a ship. Sailors counted the number of knots that passed through their hands in a given time to determine the ship’s speed. Today’s sailors and aircraft pilots still express speed in knots. Nothing in that entry or any of the others that I’ve seen have said that’s wrong. I know that sounds like it’s one of those, “Oh, there used to be an actual log,” and it sounds like one of those dumb things, but in this case, it actually appears to be true.
Hedvig: It does.
Chase: Interesting.
Hedvig: Well, what I’m worried about is that it’s a very attractive story.
Daniel: Yes. If it’s attractive, then you got to worry about it.
Hedvig: Sometimes, that means it spreads to wildfire through several sources because everyone’s like, “That’s fun and quirky. People think we’re really boring. Let’s add a fun and quirky thing so that people think we’re fun.”
Daniel: On the other hand, we do know that this is a fairly well-documented thing and people have described… Let’s just see if in the Oxford English Dictionary, is there a record of people saying, “We threw the log overboard and counted the number of knots,” and blah, blah.
Hedvig: I checked Etymonline. Urban Dictionary is being very silly, as per usual. They’re saying that it has to do with Captain Kirk’s feces.
Daniel: Why wouldn’t it be?
Hedvig: Of course.
Chase: It’s interesting because the logbook has been completely disassociated in many contexts from anything nautical. You’ve left off the deck part or the captain’s part, and now anyone can conceivably have a logbook in which you’re just recording the events of the day or the shift or whatever thing is going on. Boy Scout troop logbook or something.
Daniel: Well, here’s a description from 1574. I’m just going to read some of these quotes from Oxford. 1574, “They hail…” I guess, that means haul. “They hail in the log or piece of wood again and look how many fathom the ship hath gone in that time.” 1644, “Somebody out of the gallery, let’s fall the log.” 1669, “We throw the log every two hours.” And then, 1719, “Heave the log from the poop,” which brings in our Captain Kurt metaphor there.
Hedvig: Okay, I have a question for you two.
Chase: Okay.
Hedvig: Log is also used in programming when you write a script and you get output. While you’re waiting for the output, you might make the script report to a log. What that means is it’ll do its output and do its thing, but it’ll also be like it’ll write in this little text document, “I did this thing, the time is this.” And then when it finishes another task, it’s like, “And I did this thing and the time is that.” You can look at the log because you don’t want to sit and babysit your script all the time. You can look at what it did at what time, which is good if you want to try and make it more efficient in a certain ways. That’s called a log. Not like a logbook or anything. It’s just called a log. Another thing in programming that’s called a log is when you log transform a number.
Daniel: Is that word rhythmic?
Chase: But that’s logarithm.
Hedvig: This is where I was going to see if you guys would be confused, but you weren’t.
Chase: [laughs]
Daniel: And we both weren’t. Both of us.
Hedvig: Good job.
Daniel: Don’t forget also that on computers, you log in and log out. So, that comes from log as well.
Chase: [crosstalk] that gets logged somewhere.
Daniel: Also, don’t forget blog, which comes from web log. So, there’s a log again.
Hedvig: Yeah, but if you learn programming today and you learn like, “Oh, you’re typing to a log and here’s a log transform of this number,” you can see how someone could be like, “Oh, are those related? What’s going on?”
Daniel: Oh, no. Ambiguity, once again. This one’s from Glyph, ‘keelhaul’. This sounds really terrible. Did it really happen? Did people really get keelhauled?
Chase: I do know that people, in fact were keelhauled. It goes back to, I believe, Roman times, where it was a prescribed punishment. There’s two ways it’s described, as I understand it. One is where there’s ropes tied to the person’s hands and the feet, and they’re dragged on the underside of the ship and these ships have a bunch of barnacles on them. This person, if they’re continuously dragged along their back, they’re most likely dead or permanently crippled by the time they get to the other side. It would be a near-death sentence for someone who had committed some particularly egregious act, which back in the days of really premodern sail, could be something as little as talking back to an officer or falling asleep on your watch could quite literally be the death sentence back then.
The more modern “version” was practiced by the Dutch. I think it has a Dutch origin, where they would tie your feet or your arms to one of the masts, and then they would sink you with lead on your feet, and then they would pull you, and then that would be cut, and then you’d be pulled so you wouldn’t be scraped along all the barnacles. Nonetheless, it would be a cold and painful and humiliating punishment and it was considered particularly barbaric. I don’t believe that ever happened with the Royal or US Navy, but who knows what happens at sea sometimes, I think it would not be unheard of.
Hedvig: I was going to say probably at some point, right? People think up crazy stuff.
Daniel: I need to go back a step. What part of the boat is the keel, is it the bottom?
Chase: The keel is the bottom.
Daniel: You get hauled under the keel and then that’s how you get keelhauled, allegedly in the start.
Hedvig: When you have a sailing ship, like if you have a small sailing ship and you’re doing racing, then usually you have a small boat and then you have a long keel because the deeper your keel is, the more stable you are.
Chase: Yeah. A lot of sailboats will have a deep protrusion fin effectively for additional stabilization. There’s a lot of maritime engineering that goes into that. The keel is technically it’s just that the backbone, the very bottom part in the middle, the backbone. You could broadly a more expansive people know you’re talking about definition, be anything on the bottom portion of the boat, below the waterline, generally.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: It is what will hit ground if anything hits ground.
Chase: Correct. That would leave you high and dry if the tide went out. [chuckles]
Daniel: High and dry, there you go. Let’s move on to Laura’s question about ‘booty’ because I found something interesting about that one. Do we have any idea why booty is called booty? Or is this one me? Should I try it?
Chase: Educate us. Yeah.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: To shoes, somehow?
Daniel: Unrelated, not related to shoes. This ties into a question. Sometimes, people ask me, “Why is it good, better, and best? Why isn’t it good, gooder, and goodest?”
Hedvig: Why is anything?
Daniel: [chuckles] Why is anything anything?
Hedvig: Why is anything? Huh?
Daniel: But, in this case, there’s an interesting answer.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Good is a word that supplanted an older word that did have a B in it. The word was bot. Bot, better, and best. Eventually, ‘good’ took over because people liked it but the better and best remained. The word ‘bot’ meant some advantage or something good. If you managed to get your hands on some booty, that was something good, that gave you an advantage or gave you something, it was good for you to have that. Now, the word ‘bot’ survives in exactly two places that I know of, and that’s booty, which is something good, or ‘to boot’. It’s delicious and nutritious to boot. That means in addition to, that’s another additional good thing. Booty and to boot, but they are not related to boots that you wear on your feet. And that’s why we call it booty.
Chase: Booty always has somewhat of an unsavory or seedy or piratical, perhaps, connotation or do you guys have a different one? Is that just me?
Daniel: Booty, booty.
Hedvig: Well, it’s pirates, right?
Chase: Right.
[laughter]
Daniel: That’s exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking, “Well, I mean, it is kind of unsavoury, but I mean, pirates, right? “
Hedvig: Anything that you get, you might call booty, I don’t know, but maybe if you’re doing not on sea, but you’re doing some kind of capturing of something good, like if you’re an army and you’re trying to… or if you’re playing a videogame and you’re trying to capture the flag, maybe you could call that booty. I feel like you need to get it through violence.
Daniel: Yeah, it’s nefarious. Definitely.
Chase: Yeah. I guess ultimately it [unintelligible 00:45:41] violence, but I would say pirates’ booty, it’s buried treasure, effectively.
Hedvig: Okay, here’s where I get to say why I went, “Ooh, ooh,” earlier when Daniel was saying about bot, botter, and bottest or best.
Daniel: Oh, yes.
Hedvig: Scandinavian languages, we have ‘boot’, which means nowadays, which means improvement, and it means like a cure.
Daniel: Oh, my goodness.
Hedvig: If you got poisoned, then what you need is a boot, [Swedish word] like a bettering agent.
Daniel: Amazing.
Hedvig: It doesn’t mean it’s good anymore, but it means cure. But it looks like it’s the same thing. I’m looking up on Etymology.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s cool. Oh, I’m so glad there’s a Scandi reflex. That’s really rad.
Hedvig: Well, I mean, this is going to happen all the time, right?
Daniel: Yeah. Here’s another one that Laura said maybe has a Scandi reflex, and that’s landlubber. Hedvig, does that twig anything for you?
Hedvig: We would say something else, right?
Daniel: Because I’ve got here, there’s a Swedish dialectical word, whatever that means.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: Lubber, a plump, lazy fellow. Heard of that one?
Hedvig: Sorry, what?
Daniel: Some sort of lazy lout?
Chase: I’ve heard of lubber, as in like a person, a generic, perhaps Scandinavian old-fashioned term for person.
Daniel: A plump, lazy fellow. That’s what my sources are giving me.
Hedvig: How are you spelling it?
Daniel: L-U-B-B-E-R.
Hedvig: L-U-B-B…
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: That’s not an L sound, that’s U sound, but fine. Huh.
Daniel: So, that’s a thing.
Hedvig: L-U-B-B-A-R.
Daniel: E-R. Or is there a lobi, L-O-B-I, which is a lazy…
Hedvig: What I’m confused about is that there’s the word ‘job’. Can you spell it in the Zoom chat? I’m confused about the words. I’m very bad with spelling. I’m a very bad linguist. When people tell me letters, my brain cannot make them into words.
Daniel: Totally understand.
Hedvig: -spell it in the Zoom chat.
Daniel: Totally understand. Here I go.
Hedvig: L-U-B-B.
Daniel: There’s my reference there in chat.
Hedvig: Lubber. Okay, there’s no J there.
Daniel: No.
Hedvig: Thought you said a J. See, this is why you can’t trust me when you say letters. Well, there’s the only one I know which the thing says here, which is ‘lubba’, which means to run.
Daniel: Probably not.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly.
Daniel: I’m willing to cast some doubt on my etymology there. I would just like to say, however, that the existence of landlubbers supposes the existence of other kind of lubbers, for example, airlubbers, firelubbers, and of course, waterlubbers, which are sort of presumed.
Hedvig: Before the Fire Nation attacked. Yeah.
Chase: Have you heard of any other sort of lubber in usage?
Daniel: It’s not like monger, is it? We should have all kinds of mongers floating around, but it’s always something bad, like scandalmonger, whoremonger, rumourmonger and fish.
Chase: Fish, yeah.
Hedvig: I was going to say so ‘lub’ can be a kind of fish, and it can be a word for… oh, yeah. It’s connected with running, like to run in various ways.
Chase: I wonder if that has a same root.
Hedvig: I don’t know what this thing is [crosstalk] lazy fellow.
Daniel: Not sure.
Hedvig: Oh, it can be a clumsy object.
Daniel: What? Well, that’s what I want. So, what is that one?
Hedvig: Well, it just says clumsy objects in 1755.
Daniel: That sounds like a relevant sense.
Hedvig: Yeah, but really, it’s a very, very small entry.
Daniel: And it’s very late as well, 1700s, because we start seeing lubber from 1300s, which is really early.
Hedvig: Maybe it’s landlubber, as someone who runs around on land. That makes way more sense to me.
Chase: Oh.
Daniel: That makes sense.
Hedvig: It’s not a crazy, lazy person, it’s a person who runs around. Oh, maybe they’re crazy and lazy. Is this where I get to say that Viking was a job?
Daniel: I did not know that you could be like that was your occupation.
Hedvig: No, the idea that all Scandi people doing like 800 to 1200 were Vikings is not true. Viking was a small part of the population who had the job of going seafaring and terrorising other people and try to get things from them. They were Viking.
Chase: But primarily trading.
Hedvig: The majority of the population were farmers.
Chase: But primarily trading though because most of them, they went down a lot of the Danube and a bunch of other central European rivers. There’s tons of Vikings essentially, who were trading with the Byzantine Empire.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. They were part of the Byzantine Guard and things like that. But they also raped and pillaged.
Chase: Raiding England.
Hedvig: Yeah. It’s very much two sides of the same… they were doing both things all the time, probably, when they could rape and pillage, they did, I think.
Chase: Whatever is the easiest.
Daniel: And sometimes, they didn’t. I know that there are records of Vikings, like Scandi people coming to England and then just coexisting, in fact, sometimes taking land that was worse if other land was already taken.
Chase: Well, England was just this extraordinarily rich land, especially compared to Scandinavia, probably, and before England was unified, they had a bunch of independent kingdoms, essentially, and, the Vikings essentially just arrived, and they, over the course of a generation, conquered a bunch of it and got themselves… And then, once you have this area, it’s like, “Well, why do we have to keep raiding? We could just stick around and become king of this great area.” Then, they became part of the aristocracy and either intermarried or came to some accommodation with the existing English aristocratic and power structures. Now, we have Anglo Saxon Mormon inflected England.
Hedvig: I mean, that was part of it. Whenever they do genetic survey of England, they find Scandinavian DNA. You can see it in certain words, you can see it particularly in Scottish, like the word for ‘child’ is ‘barn’, which is ‘barn’ in Scandi languages. Like, you can see it clearly, they still raped and pillaged and killed people.
Chase: Yeah.
Hedvig: I should say that in medieval times, also short, everyone kind of did that. That’s just the nature of ruling a society and having power involves massive killing and otherising other people. I was watching this video recently about whether we should construe that as racism or not, because, like, all through ancient times, at premodern times, like Greeks, for example, hated everyone who wasn’t Greek, regardless of their skin colour.
[laughter]
Chase: Right. I think that anything other than extreme cultural chauvinism is something that is one or two or three decades old. I think essentially every culture throughout world history has been like, “We are the greatest. The gods love us, and you all suck. Therefore, we can do whatever we want.”
Hedvig: There are a couple of cases of semi-multicultural empires, like the Songhai Empire, arguably, and the Persian Empire and a couple of more, or the Mongols who were like, “Yeah, you can practice whatever religion you want as long as you pray for our emperor.”
Chase: Do you think that the ruling ethnogroup thought that, “Oh, yeah, you guys are as good as us,” or it’s just like, “Yeah, we’re going tolerate you”?
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. It’s more like tolerate. Vikings went very far, they did trade, they did do semi-peaceful trade, maybe in some cases. Also, they definitely raped and pillaged and killed everywhere. I mean, everyone did, but they were also exceptionally good at it, as we know, because they were, like, hired to do it for other people.
Chase: [crosstalk] -militarily successful society.
Hedvig: Yeah. If we get back to naval stuff, part of the reason they were able to do it is because their shipbuilding was pretty good. They had these, like, wide keels and…
Chase: Shallow draft and could go up rivers and were… the closest thing that, I guess, medieval world had to shock and awe, were they could deliver a boatload or two of men to a village or a monastery or a town or something like that. You can’t muster a response in that amount of time. The river are highways for both trading, but also for raping and pillaging. And conveniently, all the towns were located on rivers.
Hedvig: I was listening to the fossilisation about the Shanghai Empire, and there was a period where they were really going on boats on rivers a lot. There was a particular ruler for a while who was so fond of it that when they were sieging towns, before they sieged the town, they would dig a canal to the town because he was like, “No, all the people have to arrive by boat, and if there isn’t a waterway to where we’re going, we’re going to make one.” They would just dig canals, put their boats on it. And I just think that’s…
Chase: Was that a love or the fact that it was logistically impossible to transport enough food without it?
Hedvig: Maybe, but no other emperors in the region or rulers in the region or emperors before and after this guy really did it.
Daniel: Just liked boats. “I like boats.”
Hedvig: [with accent] “I like boats, let’s go with boats.”
Chase: Interesting.
[chuckles]
Daniel: Okay, you too can see the run sheet just as well as I can.
Hedvig: No. I can’t because I’m on my husband’s computer.
Daniel: Are there any expressions that you would like to tackle? We can bounce around a little bit. Let’s get the ones that you’re especially fascinated by.
Chase: Yeah, one thing that Old Anne said, and I’m curious if you guys have an opinion on this, she said, “I just read a reference to an old seafaring journal that used the phrase, ‘Our ship got under weigh.'” That’s U-N-D-E-R space W-E-I-G-H for a ship leaving port. Interesting spelling. Apparently, the expression under weigh is a nautical one. So underway, W-A-Y, is the ship leaving port. My thought with under weigh is that it’s a premodern bad spelling prior to dictionaries and whatnot and spellcheck. Do you guys think it could be anything else?
Daniel: It does appear to be an eggcorn as far as I can tell. The story that I have here, as far as I could put together, was that way, W-A-Y, doesn’t mean a road or a route, but it is nautical. It means the progress of the ship through the water or the wake that the ship leaves behind. Way has been used like that since at least the 1600s. But I took a look at underway, W-A-Y, versus underweigh, looks like underway has been used since 1622. Underweigh with the G-H only since 1777. So, it looks like the underway, W-A-Y, is the earliest spelling. And interestingly comes from Dutch underweg, which means under or among the ways. This is a very early meaning of ‘under’, where we think of under being like, “Oh, you’re under a thing.” “It’s on top of you.” Under used to mean something like among, and that is the same sense of under as understand. As far as we can tell, when you understand something, it’s because you are standing not under the things that you understand, but you are standing among the things that you are able to comprehend. This is a fascinating super old version of ‘under’ that they used for understand and also underway. So, there’s the tie-in.
Hedvig: Isn’t weigh with the G and way just cognates?
Daniel: Ah, that I don’t know.
Hedvig: All the other Germanics we do G at the end.
Daniel: That’s true. Okay, so now we have… it’s time for the related or not game. Is way and weigh related? Let’s just find out.
Hedvig: W-A-Y and W-E-I-G-H.
Chase: Do you guys want to pre-register some guesses?
Hedvig: I think they are related.
Daniel: I think they are related because I already know that it’s underweg with a G, so why not? But what’s the unifying sense? I’m having trouble…
Hedvig: Road, way.
Daniel: The sense of weighing something, gauging its weight, what’s going on there?
Hedvig: It’s just different.
Daniel: Thank you, Hedvig.
Hedvig: Sorry. I don’t think that weighing something and this kind of weigh is related.
Daniel: You don’t?
Hedvig: I don’t. Also, before 1900, spelling is just a free for all.
Daniel: I know. But if it is written, then it probably ties in somehow. Let’s see. From etimonline.com, they mentioned that there’s weigh, that W-E-I-G-H, like something weighs a lot, comes from old high German ‘wagon’ to move or to carry or to weigh, and to move or transport in a vehicle.
Hedvig: Ah. Yes. So, they could be related.
Daniel: I think they are related. They both go back to Proto-Indo-European, ‘weg’. The unifying sense here is that you’re lifting something which shows how much it weighs, but when you lift it, you move it onto a vehicle so that you can then move it. And this ties into another sense, which is to weigh anchor, which doesn’t mean to see how heavy the anchor is. It means to lift the anchor. When you weigh something, you’ve got to lift it so that you can see how much it weighs. That implies moving and that implies taking it on some way with you.
Chase: Interesting.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Related. And I had not known that before. Okay, that was pretty cool. What’s another one that seems we can move off of our patron list onto our grab-bag if you want to. Were there any that captivated your attention?
Chase: I knew many of them or I at least heard them and suspected a nautical origin. Do you guys not know the origin of the slush fund?
Daniel: I had not. I think I want you to tell me this story because I’m still vague. I didn’t research this one in depth.
Chase: So, a slush fund. So, there’s a ship, it goes out to sea and they have this horrible hard salted meat, basically proto-beef jerky, I guess.
Daniel: Ew, you got to have it because otherwise it goes off.
Chase: [crosstalk] They kept pigs and chickens but after you ran out. And the cook aboard the ship would boil this disgusting salted meat to soften it up, and people didn’t break their rotting molars. On top of this boiling cauldron of salted hard meat, the fat would separate and form this layer of scum, and the cook would ladle off and put it in a bucket or a barrel or something. Now, you have this barrel of fat. There’s shipboard uses for this. You can use it to waterproof ropes and other things aboard a ship, but you don’t need this much. So, the ship’s cook got to sell this off for other commercial uses when the ship came in, “Here’s a barrel of fat,” and got to keep the proceeds as part of the benefits of being the ship’s cook, and he could spend it on what he wanted. And that was the slush fund.
Hedvig: Hmmm.
Daniel: Yeah, okay.
Hedvig: And the slush?
Chase: Oh, I’m sorry. And the slush was that fatty scum layer that developed on top of the boiling cauldron of salted meat that nobody apparently felt hungry enough to eat.
Daniel: But very useful.
Hedvig: Slushing around.
Daniel: It would definitely be slushy.
Chase: Yeah.
Hedvig: There’s always a tampon slushing around in my purse.
Daniel: Oh. I think that more likely were to be sloshing.
Chase: Yeah, like slushing around… So, slush, I think of it more semi-fruit… The snow has gotten dirty and started to melt, it’s this wet, slush… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah. That was the other one I was going to say.
Chase: And that is, I think, part of a similar consistency to salty fat layer on top of the cook’s cauldron.
Daniel: I wouldn’t say that somebody was slushing. Unless they were moving through slush, then I guess I could say that they were slushing. I would definitely say that they were sloshing around. I’ve never heard anybody say that they were slushing around. I know those two words seem really similar, but I haven’t heard them interchange like that.
Hedvig: What about the tampon in my purse? What would you say about that one?
Daniel: That’s sloshing around.
Hedvig: Sloshing, okay.
Daniel: I’d say it’s sloshing around.
Hedvig: Okay. Finally, English cares about vowels.
Daniel: I know, it never does before. Why start now?
Hedvig: But regardless, thank you, Chase. Slush fund, regardless of the origins of slush, slush fund is of extra money that the ship’s cook could spend on whatever they wanted, and it’s later then used to like…
Chase: From selling the slush, and then it becomes associated with some, generally, I would say corrupt connotations today.
Hedvig: Right. I was listening to the… because it’s the World Cup going on, the men’s World Cup, where nations compete in football, also called soccer. I’ve been listening to a podcast about corruption in FIFA, and they talk a lot about slush money.
Daniel: What?
Chase: Say it ain’t so. How on earth could… tell me that there was no corruption involved in a tiny Middle Eastern country with no history or infrastructure getting the World Cup. What?
Daniel: Don’t have heroes, kids.
Hedvig: And with a bunch of Swiss businessmen, because Swiss business are famous for doing everything fully transparently.
Chase: Yes.
Daniel: What the hell happened there?
Hedvig: Yeah. No, it’s a surprise for everyone involved.
Chase: All the [crosstalk] filed relevant tax authorities have no fear.
Hedvig: They talk a lot about slush money.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: The term they use in Swiss German, I think, I just remembered, I don’t know it’s the exact same, but it’s [Swiss German word]. It’s similar to the Swedish word, which means, like, “greasing agent.”
Daniel: Ah, we talk about greasing people’s palms. Ah.
Hedvig: Yeah. Which they’re probably unrelated because of this fat stuff, but it’s like, yeah, you grease the wheels.
Daniel: Definitely convergent.
Chase: Yeah. Interesting.
Daniel: I was interested in skyscraper.
Chase: Yeah. I personally had no idea that was a nautical origin. If you think about it, a sailing ship was pretty much the tallest thing around. I mean, maybe there was a church or a cathedral that was taller, but the mast would be quite literally scraping the sky, and that would be the tallest thing that probably the average person ever saw or went on top of, unless they were from a particularly big city. And so, skyscraper, right? [chuckles]
Daniel: Yep, exactly. Turns out a skyscraper has also meant different things, like a very tall hat or bonnet, a very tall person. “He’s a real skyscraper.” A very tall horse or a very tall tale. Finally, it’s settled on, I think the dominant meaning now is a very tall building, but the tallest sail appears from 1791. One more. Hedvig, you’ve got the list now. Anything you see that takes your fancy?
Hedvig: I do. Well, since I’m on a show here with Americans, and there’s a lot of American politics now in the news, maybe we should do ‘filibuster’.
Daniel: Okay, that was a fun one. That’s also in my sneakily nautical list.
Chase: Right. Obviously, a filibuster, a means of obstructing legislation with a minority party, but what is the nautical origin of that? Because that is actually, I think, one of the ones I found the most surprising.
Daniel: I would have said that this was the name of a senator who engaged in the tactic of filibustering.
Hedvig: Like Gerrymandering.
Daniel: Exactly. It sounds like it, but it’s not. It was a flee-booter, a pirate, probably, from Dutch re-booter, a free-booter. The reason you’re a free-booter is because you take the booty for free.
Hedvig: Okay.
Chase: The booty, huh?
Daniel: The booty. We’re back to booty again. We haven’t even talked about the other sense of booty, but that’s for a different show. If you are a senator and you want to shut down debate on a topic and just obstruct, it’s because you’re pirating people’s time or you’re overthrowing the way that things normally go.
Hedvig: But how do you get from free to fili?
Daniel: Well, R and L are both approximants.
Chase: [laughs]
Hedvig: Oh, my God. And then, you flip them around.
Daniel: Yes. Metathesis is a very common process.
Hedvig: Add another vowel.
Daniel: And buster, from booter to buster. It probably went through a lot of different languages because this shows up in a lot of places. But yeah, the sounds bounce around a lot. So, we got re-booter and then finds its way into filibuster.
Hedvig: Is it safe to say that the metaphor in English for what you do in the politics is that you’re pirating other people’s time?
Daniel: Yes, I believe that is the intended sense.
Chase: There are certainly… whoever is currently in the majority would say that you are pirating the people’s will as well. Although, of course, whose will you or pirating depends on who is in power, of course.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Right. But the other languages that have something like free-booter, etc., that just means a kind of pirate. And then, that word for pirate in English happened to verge off to sucking other people’s time and energy, like an emotional vampire or something.
Daniel: A senatorial pirate.
Chase: Right. [laughs]
Hedvig: Okay. I really thought it was like Latin.
Daniel: I think that if you’re going to filibuster and you’re a senator, you have to do two things. Number one, you have to actually talk. You have to actually talk, not just threaten to filibuster. And then number two, you have to wear the hat.
Chase: And an eye patch.
Daniel: And an eye patch.
Hedvig: You have to vaguely talk on topic as well, right?
Daniel: Well, not anymore, because now you just have to threaten a filibuster and that’s enough to make it happen.
Hedvig: But you can’t be like, “Today, I had a cup of coffee and…”
Chase: Oh, no. You most certainly can.
Hedvig: Really?
Daniel: Oh, yes.
Chase: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: Yes. Gumbo recipes have been read from the Senate floor as part of a filibuster.
Chase: Phonebooks, the Constitution again and again and again and again and again, how many times we need to hear the income tax amendment or something like that.
Daniel: “I do not yield my time.” Let’s just finish up. We got a few minutes left. Let’s just talk about the expressions that everyone thinks are nautical, but just simply are not. I’m thinking of “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
Chase: [laughs]
Hedvig: First time I ever heard that.
Daniel: What’s this? “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.” What’s the story here, Chase? What have you heard? Have you heard this?
Chase: I have heard this phrase, but I have not heard it enough to actually ascribe a meaning to it beyond a laugh. [chuckles] Doing a little bit of research for the show because I was curious and [unintelligible [01:09:31] curiosity. It has something to do with cannonballs?
Daniel: The story is that they would arrange cannonballs in a pyramid on a tray aboard the ship, and the tray was called a brass monkey. Supposedly, when it would get cold, the tray would contract and the cannonballs would spill out. Nothing like that was ever used to store cannonballs. Just did not happen.
Chase: So, was monkey from like the powder monkey or what?
Hedvig: What’s powder monkey?
Chase: Oh, the powder monkey. So, that was in the age of sail, they have the gun decks where the cannons are, and they kept the gunpowder far away from there so there’s not chain explosions and you don’t lose the ship. That’s kept in a very isolated, packed away, surrounded by sand room. It was only brought out in small increments. They had these young boys, often 10, 11, 12 years old, they would be the powder monkeys and they would go get in small increments gunpowder and bring it to the individual gun crews. A couple rounds worth or however many, and those are the powder monkeys.
Hedvig: They’re similar to like ball boys in cricket and baseball?
Chase: Right, exactly.
Daniel: Oh, yeah, in tennis. There may have also been a cannon called a brass monkey, just to bring that in. No, the original expression from the 1840s was “cold enough to freeze the nose off a brass monkey.” By the 1850s, we see, “freeze the tail off a brass monkey.” 1880s, we see, “the ears off a brass monkey.” In 1920s, we see “the whiskers off a brass monkey.” Finally settling in the 1960s on, “cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey.” Michael Quinion of World Wide Words thinks that it’s about the three wise monkeys, they cover their eyes, they cover their ears.
Hedvig: Okay. There were brass figurines of these monkeys around?
Daniel: That’s right.
Hedvig: Europe. People were like, “Oh, if it’s cold enough that one of their parts fall off, then it must be really cold.”
Daniel: That’s the thing. Sometimes you do see four brass monkeys instead of just the three, and you can guess what the fourth monkey is covering up.
Chase: [laughs]
Hedvig: Okay, thank you very much. I have two cats that are running around and I see that we have let the cat out of the bag on this list, and I’m going to see if I can… well, they’re chasing each other. You’re going to come and say hi? Oh, your tail is all bushy because you’re all excited because you’re being chased. Here is Sandy and he loves being in bags.
Daniel: Sandy.
Chase: Okay.
Hedvig: If I have a cloth bag and I open it, he will just go inside.
Daniel: Goodness gracious.
Hedvig: I have this on video. He loves being in bags. He loves bags much more than boxes. So, what’s the story we let the cat out of the bag, please?
Chase: Letting the cat out of the bag, letting the secret go, I believe that it comes from the cat o’ nine tails, which is the traditional nine-tailed filleting whip that would be used to lash the sailors for what we would today consider relatively trivial misdemeanors but punishment used to be harsh aboard Royal Navy vessels, probably other navies as well. It was kept in a bag, right?
Daniel: Was it though really? Was it really?
[laughter]
Chase: Perhaps it was kept in the bosun’s waist, depending on the nature of the ship. The phrase comes from there. Sailor who had done whatever was wrong would let the cat out of the bag and out comes cat o’ nine tails, and people would be lashed mercilessly. That was not eliminated until the… years escaped me, but shockingly late. The lash was still liberally applied in the Royal Navy, and in fact, it was never… I don’t want to say never, but it was nowhere near as extensively done in the United States Naval tradition and conditions were generally better aboard US navy ships, which is a contributing factor towards a lot of British sailors trying to get aboard said British ships causing shortfalls of manpower during the Napoleonic War, and thus the British trying to steal them back and instigating the War of 1812.
Daniel: Hmm. So that’s the story. Now, I was looking for instances of “let the cat out of the bag.” It seems like… and this is one of the things, if you see it and it’s talking about ships, then that’s cool, but if it’s not talking about ships, then you kind of go, “Hmm.” And the earliest instances that we have, have nothing to do with punishment. They are seriously talking about letting a literal cat out of a literal bag, which means that some bad thing is going to happen, some kind of incident is going to happen because you got an angry cat that’s hissing and spitting. This one doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the cat o’ nine tails. That would be a fanciful naval ascription.
The other one is “enough room to swing a cat,” which you got to ask, are we talking about a room that’s big enough to grab an actual cat by the tail and swing it around, or are we talking about swinging a cat o’ nine tails? Seems that the cat o’ nine tails has only been attested in print from 1695, whereas the “enough room to swing a cat” is quite a bit earlier, 1665. 30 years may not be enough to really establish that, but it looks like the “swinging a cat” expression, as in a literal cat, comes before the cat o’ nine tails. I think that is a fanciful ascription as well. What do you think? Does that sound about right?
Chase: Sounds fine to me.
Hedvig: Please do not ever do any of these things. Don’t swing a cat [crosstalk] around, don’t trap a cat. Well, if you need to take them to the vet, we need to take our cat to the vet we needed to trap him, but generally.
Daniel: Don’t lash people either.
Hedvig: I have to say that Daniel’s use of “quite a bit earlier,” and it was 30 years.
Daniel: I know, you’re right.
[laughter]
Hedvig: I am older than 30.
[laughter]
Daniel: I did say, didn’t I? I said that’s pretty tight, but as far as we know.
Hedvig: That’s pretty tight.
Chase: I have one more. It’s not on the run sheet. I heard this, this fake naval origin of a phrase. I saw it at a nautical museum and I couldn’t remember which one, so I called around a bunch of nautical museums and they still have it up and I told them they are wrong.
Daniel: Oh.
Chase: So that they could take it down. I’ve gone to a lot of them.
Daniel: I’ll totally do that.
Chase: It is a “son of a gun.” Have you guys heard that and could you guess a naval origin? A fake naval origin, mind you.
Daniel: I did research this one. Hedvig, what do you think?
Hedvig: I have no idea, but I’m going to guess that it’s like the person manning the canon.
Daniel: Okay, so I’ve heard two stories, but which one do you want to talk about, Chase?
Chase: I want to hear your guess, and then I’ll tell you what I saw at the museum, which is quite… just go ahead.
Daniel: [chuckles] Well, I was going to say a hired gun is a sailor or… and then they would say that a sailor who has lots of… sailors go around to lots of places and so they would have lots of children who were conceived out of wedlock. If you were such a person, then you could be considered a son of a gun, that is to say a hired gun or somebody who operates guns on a ship or something like that.
Chase: That’s close to what was in this museum. It was purportedly ascribed to the lowest of the low, meaning the Royal Navy ship, it goes to a port in some foreign land, and they don’t let their enlisted sailors off because they’re all probably dragooned there, and not there willingly and they wouldn’t come back. The officers go off, and meanwhile the enlisted sailors are kept aboard. And the local prostitutes, spying a business opportunity, row out or get transported out. On the gun deck, which is one deck below the deck exposed to the weather, they would erect sheets effectively to create a seedy motel of sorts. These prostitutes would cavort with the enlisted sailors who could not go ashore because they would not come back. If you were the son of a gun, you were the child of a prostitute that visited the enlisted sailors, and therefore the lowest of the low and a son of a gun.
Daniel: That’s a great story.
Hedvig: And you’re saying that’s not correct?
Chase: It is not. [laughs]
Daniel: The other story that’s also incorrect is that the pregnant women who happen to find themselves aboard naval vessels would give birth in the space between the guns so that you could keep the decks clear. You could clear the decks. And also equally spurious… Fun story, but maybe a little too fun. So, what’s the real story, Chase?
Chase: Chase the real story is just a phrase that came up, a minced phrase essentially, and much less colorful, but solidly no naval origin and there was not any until well over hundred years after the phrase first came about. There were some folk etymologies, I guess, that tried to ascribe a fun naval origin. So, that’s very disappointing.
Daniel: Yup.
Hedvig: But the one that Daniel said first sounds like it could still be true because hired guns, it’s not just a naval phenomenon. A hired gun is any hired mercenary regardless if they’re on water or not.
Daniel: Possibly. But once again, I guess that the key here is you look at the first instance, does it have anything to do with those things or does it have any quotes like, “As the military men say, a son of a gun,” and we just don’t see that. We only see people making up these stories hundred years after the phrase comes up. I think the most likely answer is you don’t want to call somebody a son of a bitch, we like rhymes. We like things that rhyme. If it rhymes, it must be true. Drunk as a skunk, even though skunks don’t have any observable tendency toward inebriation. Loose as a goose, I guess keeps you kind of loose. Snug as a bug in a rug. We just love those expressions, and son of a gun is one of those. You say it and everyone knows what you mean.
Hedvig: It’s for son of a bitch.
Daniel: Yup. That’s the one.
Hedvig: Okay. All right.
Daniel: Ah. What have we learned? We have learned the danger of attractive etymologies.
Hedvig: Hmm.
Chase: We have learned the origins of several actually naval phrases, many of which I did not suspect.
Daniel: Yeah, I learned that lots of expressions that we use are sneakily nautical, and we didn’t get to this one, but I want to do it, ‘ahead’. Saying that something is ahead. That’s because it’s at the head of the ship. It’s not a stern, it’s ahead. It’s at the front. And that is originally nautical. Fascinating stuff. There’s a lot of these. But I think that maybe because we only scratched the surface, not a nautical expression, I think we need to come back and do some more one of these days. Chase, what do you say?
Chase: I am certainly down for that. I would not want to leave you high and dry. You could consider this just a shot across the bow of future nautical collaborations, and if you truly felt the need, you could press gang me into another one if I’m not giving you too wide a berth, and then we could chew the fat again together.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: Oh, God. They were doing this. Listeners, they were doing this before we started recording as well. I apologise.
[laughter]
Daniel: Oh, my gosh. Well, that’s all right. We’re keeping selves aloof from all of these metaphors.
Hedvig: Oh, my God. Chase, are you also a father?
Chase: No, I’m not.
Hedvig: Is this is a dad thing?
Chase: [laughs]
Daniel: Okay.
Chase: I’m preemptively developing a repertoire of dad jokes and whatnot.
Hedvig: All right, you’re Americans, and it is Thanksgiving season, so I guess that’s the cultural part of it, that you have to make dad jokes. Anyway, thank you very much for being on the show, Chase. I think we’re wrapping up.
Daniel: I feel like. We’d like to say big thanks to our guests for this episode, Chase Dalton, from the US Naval History Podcast. Chase, how can people find your show or you?
Chase: So, they can find me or the show, primarily go on any podcasting platform. US Naval History Podcast, got a big picture of battleship shooting. Both Twitter and Instagram @USNavyPodcast. To anyone listening on my feed, if you have enjoyed this, I have immensely enjoyed listening to episodes of Because Language, and I have, A, learned a lot, and B, been thoroughly entertained. So, by all means, go over there and subscribe to their feed as well please.
Daniel: Fantastic. Thanks also to everybody who gave us ideas for the show. Thanks to Dustin of Sandman Stories, who recommends us to everyone. Thanks to the team at SpeechDocs who transcribes this episode and every other and most of all, our patrons who give us so much support, make it possible to keep the show going.
If you like the show, there are different things that you can do to help us along. You can send us ideas and feedback, like all of the lovely people who sent us ideas and feedback for this show. There are lots of ways to do that. You could follow us on the socials. We’re @becauselangpod everywhere, except Spotify. Remember when everyone was dumping Spotify? That was fun. Lasted about four months. You can leave us a message with SpeakPipe, that’s on our website, becauselanguage.com. You can send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com, or you can tell a friend about us, or even leave us a review in all the places where you can leave reviews. There are many such places. Hedvig, your current favorited.
Hedvig: The Podchaser.
Daniel: Podchaser? That’s the one.
Hedvig: Yeah. It’s not iTunes.
Daniel: It’s not iTunes, it’s not Apple, it’s not Google. It’s something else.
Hedvig: If you’re not using iTunes to listen to podcasts and you want to review, you can review most podcast apps including Podcast Addicts and Pocket Casts and all of them have their own review systems.
Daniel: We love them all.
Hedvig: Podcasts is this interesting space. It’s just an RSS feed, and it’s this highly distributed thing. But Podchaser is the place where a lot of people leave reviews that isn’t iTunes. So, I’d recommend Podchaser.
Chase: A big thing that people can do, and I have seen drive spikes in traffic is someone can go on Reddit and find the appropriate subreddit or something like that or whatever their social media platform choices and be like, “I really enjoyed this. I learned this and this,” and a personalized review to people that are in there in community. It’s always nice, warm, and fuzzy when someone appreciates you.
Hedvig: Those reviews are often very good because they’re specific. It’s like, “I know this forum, community and I know this and this podcast is good because of these reasons.” Instead of like, “I really like this podcast.”
Chase: Yep, yep.
Hedvig: That’s, yeah, very broad. If you’re listening to this episode when it comes out, it means that you are a supporter on Patreon. We are very grateful for that. You enable us to do things like make these bonus episodes. We also maintain a Discord channel where you can hang out with us and you make it possible for us to make transcripts, so that we can search, and search our podcast feed from the back where like, “When were they talking about the balls of brass monkeys?” You can find that now.
Daniel: How many episodes. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah. I’m going to give a special shoutout to our top patrons. Okay, I don’t think I’m going to do it in one breath. I’m not even going to try. It used to be possible to do it in one breath. It is no longer, I would… [crosstalk]
Chase: [crosstalk] -you could popcorn over to me if you would like. Is that not a school thing? [chuckles]
Hedvig: What word did you say?
Daniel: Popcorn. Ooh, new idiom.
Chase: Oh, my goodness.
Daniel: Is that nautical?
Chase: No, this is just in school, when you’re reading a text out loud for any class, you would read a sentence or two and then you would say, “Popcorn Chase” or “Popcorn Anne.” Everyone has to be following along because in the book, seamlessly take over and if you didn’t, then you broke the…[crosstalk]
Daniel: Ooh, let’s try it.
Hedvig: Okay. Let’s try it. Okay.
Daniel: Okay, go ahead. Hedvig, you start.
Hedvig: Okay, I’m going to start. Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Udo, Jack. Popcorn Chase.
Chase: PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, [chuckles] Popcorn Daniel!
Daniel: Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Popcorn Hedvig.
Hedvig: Cheyenne, Felicity S, Amir, Canny, Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, Felicity G. And our lovely Kate B who over one year ago now, pressed the one-time donation button on our website and gave us a hefty sum of money and we’re very grateful for that still. We will continue thinking her for a long time to come. And we’d want to give a special shoutout to our newest patrons: At the Listener level, we have Brian Q, Thew, and AJ. Also, Justine and Eleanor, who just bumped it up to the Listener level. Thanks to all of our amazing patrons.
Chase: Finally, the theme music for this podcast was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time.
Hedvig: Because Language.
Daniel: Because Language.
Chase: Oh, no. [laughs]
Hedvig: No, sorry, you’re doing great.
Chase: Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language. There we go.
Daniel and Hedvig: Yay.
[applause]
Daniel: Thanks, Chase.
Hedvig: Good job.
Daniel: You’re a great cohost. I really like your show, and even though it’s like totally out of my wheelhouse.
Hedvig: Oh, my god.
Daniel: Hang on. I’m just sending the run sheet to Hedvig.
Hedvig: The reason Daniel is doing this Chase is because he thinks that I am not sticking to it.
Chase: Hmm.
Daniel: No, that’s not why. It’s so that you can read the reads.
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
[laughter]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]