Ryan at Camp Pendleton, a Marine who has served aboard Navy vessels, wonders why Navy noncommissioned leaders are called petty officers when their work is anything but petty. Here petty is the rank-and-size sense inherited from French petit, small...
Sean, a public affairs officer at Camp Pendleton, California, asks about gyrene, an old slang term for a Marine. The word appears in print as early as the 1890s. Although a doubtful popular theory derives it from GI plus marine, the Historical...
Dean, a Navy veteran from Lake Bay, Washington, remembers being called a cumshaw artist in Vietnam for “permanently borrowing” whatever his unit needed, from refrigerator regulators to gasoline to whiskey for a party. The term cumshaw...
Proverbs pack great truths into a few well-chosen words, no matter which language you speak. Check out this one from Belize: “Don’t call the alligator a big-mouth till you have crossed the river.” And this truism from Zanzibar:...
Why is it that what you say to your family and what they hear are different? If you say “no,” your child hears “maybe,” and if you say “maybe,” she hears “ask again and again,” and “yes” is...
Navy veterans will recognize the two-fingered gesture that looks as if someone’s turning an invisible doorknob. It accompanies the order turn to, meaning “get to work.” How did this handy expression get started? This is part of a...
