Lots Of English Words You Use Everyday Come From Sailors, And Not Just The Dirty Ones

Screenshot: PBS

Modern day Anglophones are descended from generations of seafaring explorers, traders, naval military conquerors, and imperialism. The core of the anglosphere is found in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all former colonies of the British Empire, and all heavily water-based geographies. What I’m saying is, we used to spend a whole lot of time on boats, and the language developed over hundreds of years to incorporate sailor slang into everyday use. Do you ever wonder why you can be “overwhelmed” but never “whelmed?” Watch this quick video from PBS to get your bearings.

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You can’t swing a cat in here without hitting a word that has maritime origins. It’s a pretty long shot that you haven’t heard any of these in regular use before. Maybe you’ve got some junk laying around, or you’ve woken up groggy after a long night of drinking. Hell, you’re reading this on a blog right now, which has its own logbook/log-line tie to nautical terms.

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With so many sailors traversing the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it makes a lot of sense that they would push their vernacular into the public consciousness. Many of them even became influential authors, such as Herman Melville, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway, and incorporated boating phrases into their popular literature.

There’s so much about the sea that we still don’t know, but we learned plenty of good ways to talk about it by putting a bunch of young punks on boats hundreds of years ago and letting them develop a vernacular. It’s so much easier to say “I like the cut of your jib” than to elucidate the positive attributes about a person. It’s a vibe thing, really. And isn’t that what language is about anyway? Vibes?