Rope vs. Line, Sailors vs. Landlubbers

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tim calling from Alaska. How are you guys today?

What’s on your mind, Tim?

Well, I called you guys because there’s something that’s come up and miggled my brain for several years.

And it has to do with rope. I use that term because everybody knows what rope is.

But it has different names depending on where you use it.

So, for example, line and rope. I was always trying to figure out the difference.

So I looked it up, and the only distinction I found was that line is something that had a definite purpose and rope did not.

But my experience doesn’t bear that out.

I was a commercial fisherman in Alaska for 15-plus years.

You might carry a piece of rope down to the boat, but the moment you set foot on that deck, it became line.

If you called the rope, then you clearly hadn’t spent much time on the water.

My wife ran sled dogs pretty seriously up here for quite a while, and she taught me how to do that.

I noticed the same thing in that occupation or in that activity, gang line, tug line, neck line, that kind of thing.

But as a young man working on a ranch in eastern Washington, you didn’t line a cow or a calf, you roped it.

And the rope hanging from your saddle had a very definite purpose, so that distinction didn’t bear out.

And it’s one of those things you can lay awake at night and you can’t sleep and say, what’s going on here?

Hopefully you can help me out.

A fellow word nerd.

Oh, yeah.

I don’t know that we’re going to get to the bottom of this, Tim,

But I love that you’ve got these disparate experiences,

Working on a ranch, sled dogging, and working as a fisherman.

And all three of these you bring to bear on the subject of rope versus line.

And I think it’s important just to say that they’re probably all right.

And it’s really the custom of the trade or the profession.

It’s really whatever the people agree, that’s the word you need to use.

Otherwise, you’re going to be seen as an outsider.

I mean, we all know how easy it is on a ship to be seen as a landlubber, right?

Absolutely.

Don’t call the toilet the head or you call the galley a kitchen.

And you don’t know the difference between port and starboard.

Yep. I’ve had those experiences many times.

It’s what I always say on the show.

When people spend a lot of time together working towards one common goal,

They develop a lingo of their own, and that’s just the way it stays.

And it’s probably not even something that they think about.

It becomes the language, and then they teach that language to others,

And that’s how it passes from person to person.

So that’s why a rope is line in seafaring, and that’s just the way it is.

I hate to say that because we’d love for there to be a wonderful story or a reason, but sometimes there isn’t.

Although sometimes, particularly with boats, there’s a little bit of avoidance of classism or elitism there.

There’s a line in Richard Mayne’s book, The Language of Sailing, where he talks about the basics of referring to sea craft.

And he talks about ship versus boat and how landlubbers will often call things boats that people who know the sea would never call a boat.

They would call it a ship.

And then he says yacht owners will self-deprecatingly refer to their own crafts as boats, but they will call somebody else’s vessel a yacht.

But they would never refer to their own as my yacht because they would never be respected.

You know, no self-respecting person would say my yacht this and my yacht that because it would be snobby.

Well, that condescension is something I’ve seen on boats.

If you use the wrong term, people look as candid.

Well, I will say, as you said, that’s a little bit dissatisfying, but at least I know.

I appreciate that.

And you guys take care.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Thanks, Tim.

You bet.

Bye-bye.

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