Mark in Bismarck, North Dakota, spent years as a sailor, and wonders about the term sea painter, meaning “a rope attached to a lifeboat.” Why painter? The word may derive from Middle French pendeur meaning “a kind of rope that hangs,” literally...
While vacationing on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, a listener encountered an Australian who used the term skylarking to mean “horsing around.” The verb to skylark goes back hundreds of years and once referred to racing through the rigging of a...
After a recent discussion on the show about garage-sailing, a listener from Henderson, Kentucky, sent us an apt haiku: Early birds gather near a green sea/ Garage doors billow on the morning wind/ Yard-saling. This is part of a complete episode...
To reef something, means to “tug hard” or “push vigorously,” as you might with a window that’s stuck. It comes from the sailing term reef, which refers to an action used to make a sail smaller. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
The idiom by and large, an idiom commonly known to mean “in general,” actually combines two sailing terms. To sail by means you’re sailing into the wind. To sail large, means that you have the wind more or less at your back. Therefore, by and large...
A wedding photographer says she happens to run into lots of people who are three sheets to the wind, and wonders why that term came to mean “falling-down drunk.” Turns out, it’s from nautical terminology. On a seagoing vessel, the term sheets refers...