Sea language comes ashore

[Jonathan Lighter]

An interviewee who served in the SPARs (the women's branch of the U.S. Coast Guard) during WWII recalls on an episode of Fox News Channel's _War Stories_ that when she joined the service in 1942, she was instructed to take the "first ladder, second deck starboard" to her "billet."  This sounded to her like gibberish, especially since they were in a building, not on shipboard. But she was informed that all Coast Guard structures were to be described in nautical terms.

  So by 1942 the deliberate application of shipboard terminology on dry land had become the norm in all three U.S. naval services - the Coast Guard as well as the Navy and Marine Corps. Walls became "bulkheads," kitchens always "galleys," and so forth.  The practice may also have started up the superstition that except for the "bellrope," a ship has no "ropes," only "lines."

  An 18th and 19th C. convention was that sailors always talked this way, more or less, but that seems to have been largely an artistic fiction.

  I don't know of any reference to this enforced extension of jargon as part of the training routine during 1917-18 or earlier. It would be interesting to know just when it began or expanded. While the occasion may have been implementation of the 1940 draft law, this minor detail in the history of English usage remains obscure, at least to me.

  JL


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