"Sailing perilously close to the wind" is a phrase that means you are about to stop making forward motion, or in this case, as it was said to an employee (if I recall the reference correctly), he is about to lose his job. Here's where it comes from: a sailboat can not sail directly into the wind; it needs to sail at angles to the wind. When a sailboat is sailing "upwind," or towards the direction from which the wind is blowing, it is also said to be sailing "close to the wind." (The angles, in this case, might be something like 35 to 45 degrees from whence the wind blows.) As a sailboat tries to squeeze its way even closer to the prevailing direction (and it would actually be an "apparent" wind direction that it would be sailing towards), the forward edge of the sail, or "luff," begins to, well, luff, or shake a bit, showing the sailor that he is beginning to sail "to close to the wind." At this point, the sail begins to lose its laminar flow, and the sail stalls thus making the boat slow and lose its momentum.
Hope this helps.
Best etc.
BCC
To Martha's atavistic and Grant's upwards of I'll add my own personal vocabulary blind spot: dilate. It's always felt to me like it should mean exactly the opposite of what it does. I sense that I'm being influenced by such words as "diminish", "decay" and "deteriorate", where the initial "d" implies a feeling something "becoming less".
I suspect some people have a similar problem with drought; many's the time I've noticed someone using it to describe conditions I'd associate with flooding. Maybe it's the initial "dr-" that links it to words like "drink" and "drown".
Ron Draney said:
To Martha's atavistic and Grant's upwards of I'll add my own personal vocabulary blind spot: dilate. It's always felt to me like it should mean exactly the opposite of what it does. I sense that I'm being influenced by such words as "diminish", "decay" and "deteriorate", where the initial "d" implies a feeling something "becoming less".
Dilate was once a problem for me too. It is much less so now, but I cannot explain why except maybe by memorization.
Emmett
Ron Draney said:
I suspect some people have a similar problem with drought; many's the time I've noticed someone using it to describe conditions I'd associate with flooding. Maybe it's the initial "dr-" that links it to words like "drink" and "drown".
I suspect you're right about the "dr" start of the word. "Dilate" was never a problem for me, nor was "drought." "Draught" (as in beer) had me screwed up for awhile, until I saw it in print.
Where I see a lot of confusion and misuse is with "dearth" vs. "plethora." And that's a bit weird, since it's got the "d" starting it.
A unicycle has one wheel, a bicycle two, a tricycle three, a quadcycle four, etc. As a longtime League of American Bicyclist member, I am protective of cycling language; I'm ok with people riding unicycles or trikes but not with talk of "three-wheel bikes".
A cyclist could be riding a cycle with various numbers of wheels. Not the case with a bicyclist or triker.