Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash
English is replete with idioms which its native speakers bandy about without a second thought, but which, if they were to stop and think about them, would surely give them pause.
By and large is one such. I’m sure most of my readers are familiar with the phrase, but for those who aren’t, it means mostly, to a large extent. For example, by and large I am a most agreeable and charming fellow. Only on the rarest of occasions and under the gravest of provocation do I become mildly - almost undetectably - abrasive.
Now ask yourself: what exactly does this idiom literally mean? What is the mysterious by that it refers to and, while we’re at it, the large as well?
If you have to ask - which I certainly did, albeit in a most agreeable manner - then you probably haven’t spent a lot of time at sea.
According to Merriam-Webster, by and large began as a sailing term. A ship sailing by is heading more or less directly into the wind. (How they do that and still manage to move forward used to bewilder me. Last year, though, a captain aboard a yacht on Lake Taupo patiently explained it to me, and now instead of being bewildered, I’m deflated to have learned it doesn’t happen by magic but because of physics. It also turns out that while a sail boat can head almost directly into the wind, it can’t sail fully directly into it for more than a brief moment; another bubble burst.)
Anyway, enough about my life’s disappointments and back to the main story. When a ship is sailing with the wind behind it, it’s said to be sailing large. No magic required there, obviously.
So by and large - and everything in between - covers the full range of options available to whoever’s in charge of the ship’s direction. That’d be the driver, I’m guessing.
By and large is one of a vast number of idioms of nautical origin. They include - and you might want to take a deep breath here - in the doldrums, pipe down, son of a gun, loose cannon, all hands on deck, dead in the water, between the devil and the deep blue sea, hard and fast, high and dry and learn the ropes. And that’s just a fraction of them.
Whoever said Britannia rules the waves had it back to front. The waves, me hearties, rule the English language.
In fact, seafaring has given us so many idioms that there exists a mythical society called CANOE, or Committee to Ascribe a Naval Origin to Everything. Its adherents, a jolly lot who have the praiseworthy attribute of not taking themselves seriously, take delight not only in listing all the idioms that seafaring has given us, but also in regularly pointing out those that have been wrongly ascribed to the endeavour.
You probably know some of the latter already. They include posh, which never meant Port Outward, Starboard Home - a reference to rich steamship passengers who were allocated cabins on those sides of the boat to avoid harsh, direct sunlight on return trips between Britain and the mid-east. The only teensy problem with that theory is that there is not a single shred of direct evidence for it.
Where the word did originate is a mystery, which creates fertile ground for all kinds of fanciful theories, of which the nautical one has gained most traction.
Equally, the balls which reputedly get frozen off a brass monkey in bracingly cold weather are not, and never were, cannon balls resting atop a brass plate (called a monkey) on the deck of a ship. They are, in fact, the brass testicles on a brass monkey, an imaginary animal that got a lot of airtime from the mid 1800s in America. Heat could also melt the poor primate’s nose (Herman Melville’s 1850 novel Omoo makes reference to this), and before they could talk the hind leg off donkeys, garrulous speakers were admired for their ability to talk the tail off a brass monkey.
Imaginary or not, it’s a wonder the poor animal had any bits left on it by the time the Americans were through.
Above: Trade winds causing colourful arrows to appear on a map of the world. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Now here’s another little known fact. Trade winds, those air currents that reliably blow east to west near the equator, and west to east closer to the poles, are not named for the breezy support they provide global commerce. In fact, it’s the other way around. Trade is a fourteenth century word meaning “path, track, course of action”, a sense that is obsolete today, but echoes of which can still be heard in the closely related word tread.
A trade wind is so called simply because it follows a regular path, human commerce be damned.
By 1540, trade could also mean a person’s habitual activities. Given the fact that many people’s habitual activities include doing business, it was a short step from there to the modern sense of trade, as in buying, selling and exchanging things.
In the 1800s, trade-related words took off. The world got trade name, trade route, trade union and trading stamps (similar to the modern gift voucher). According to etymonline, trade war didn’t enter the lexicon until 1899, even though countries had been imposing punitive tariffs on one another’s goods - and occasionally going into actual war over them - for centuries.
One of the more lively debates among modern economists is whether trade wars are still inevitable. According to Our World in Data, one fourth of total global production today is sold outside its country of origin, and exports are now 40 times greater than they were just over a century ago. If nothing else, that’s suppressed the urge of countries to lob missiles at one another when they can’t agree. Governments today, it seems, have learned what mobsters in mafia movies have known for decades: war, like a strong headwind, is bad for business.
Bits and specious
In the decade leading up to 2004, pirate attacks tripled worldwide to reach a new all-time peak. Last year, though, piracy incidents fell to their lowest level in almost three decades according to the International Maritime Board, which reports these things. For a live map of incidents so far this year, check out this web page.
A gazillion things have been written about ChatGPT by now, and I don’t propose to add much to that mountain (and I’m certainly not about to predict what it will do to us, or us to it). One tidbit though: when I asked it where the word posh comes from, it regurgitated the discredited port out, starboard home theory. Oddly, when I asked the question slightly differently, it still offered the same response but was more circumspect, saying the origin is not clear but “one theory is…”.
Evidence of English’s sheer cussedness abounds, including in some of the language’s most rarely visited corners. Think of the words cord and chord. You may be thinking that they’re quite distinct; the first meaning something resembling but not quite as substantial as a rope, and the second meaning a group of musical notes that sound quite pleasant when played simultaneously. But get this: that spinal cord that runs the length of your back marks you out as one of a phylum of animals called chordates, so named because we all have spinal cords. The h in chordate is a hangover from the Latin chordatus (having a spinal cord), but why it’s remained in chordata while being dropped in all other cases that cord is meant is anyone’s guess.
Quote of the week
Being in a ship is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.
Samuel Johnson
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