Listen to the author reading this blog post.
Today’s post is the second of a pair focusing on nautical idioms, that is, idioms relating to sailing and the ocean. Part 1 covered idioms with the words ‘boat’, ’ship’ or ‘water’. Today, I’m looking at idioms containing a range of other nautical words. Where an item of vocabulary or the nautical origin of a phrase is not clear, I have given a brief explanation.
Starting with the words ‘sailing’ and ‘sail’, an experience or period of time that is plain sailing (US also smooth sailing) is easy and without problems:
The campaign wasn’t all plain sailing, unfortunately.
It’s been smooth sailing with this project pretty much from the beginning.
Someone who sails close to the wind does something risky that is only just legal or acceptable:
They may not be breaking the law with these practices but they’re certainly sailing close to the wind.
Meanwhile, something unexpected that takes the wind out of someone’s sails makes them suddenly less confident or determined to do something:
I wasn’t expecting such a direct question, and it took the wind out of my sails.
Three nice idioms contain the word ‘deck’ originally meaning ‘the outside floor of a ship where you can walk’. If you clear the decks, you prepare to do a particular task by finishing up other jobs or removing unnecessary things. (Imagine sailors removing items from a ship’s deck in order to prepare for battle.)
Someone who hits the deck, falls or lies down quickly, sometimes in order to hide from danger:
We heard the sound of gunfire and hit the deck.
Meanwhile you might say it’s all hands on deck meaning ‘everyone must help because there is a lot of work to be done’. (A ‘hand’ here means ‘a person who does physical work’, in the original sense of this phrase, a sailor.)
It’s all hands on deck to get the room set up for the exhibition this evening.
The phrase high and dry originally referred to a ship that was stuck on land because the tide had gone out. We now use the idiom more generally to mean ‘in a very difficult situation without any help’ and we often say that someone is ‘left’ high and dry:
With no home and too little money for a rental deposit, we were left high and dry.
I’ll finish with a phrase which is very vivid once you know its nautical origin. A loose cannon was a cannon that was no longer attached to the ship and could move around the deck causing harm to the ship and the sailors. Nowadays, when we talk about a loose cannon we mean ‘a person who can behave unpredictably, causing trouble for others’:
He was regarded by many in the party as a loose cannon and not to be trusted.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my two nautical idioms posts. Whatever the week ahead holds for you, may it be plain sailing!
I ndde balance
3 day
Yes
sir, some word show two different.but adding prefix that could clear.BAT-CRICKET BAT,FLY-AEROFLY,NAIL-FINGERNAIL, BOW-AIRBOW, DIE-TYE, SINK-SUNK, RING-RINGING, DATE-LOVEDATING, WAVE-SEAWAVE. please update and replay.thanks.
thank you
Didn’t know “loose canon” came from nautical idioms, the picture of a canon becoming loose and sliding around the deck is very vivid indeed, also very chaotic and funny.
‘Plain sailing’ is a corruption of the navigation term ‘plane sailing’ as in, ‘it’s all easy from here on in’. Plane sailing was the point at which the sextant could be put away and complicated spherical trigonometry calculations were no longer required. This is because, over relatively short distances, the errors caused by the curvature of the earth become negligible and the earth can be assumed to be flat or literally a plane surface. This point will depend upon the diligence of the navigator and the dangers existing in the area in which he/she is operating. Since a nautical mile subtends one minute of arc at the earth’s surface, a distance of sixty miles will induce a ‘manageable’ error of one degree. This error compounds for every sixty miles/degree thereafter.
If nautical nonsence is something you wish..
If you “don’t like the cut of my jib” you don’t like either my appearance or my behavior.
Or it might be even both.
Many thanks for this great post, like many others I have read here on this blog.
I would like to add this idiom, which fits the context well, in my view:
“Shifting/rearrangeing the deckchairs on the Titanic”.
Happy holidays! 🙂