"The unwilling doing the unnecessary...."

Tue Oct 20 16:01:08 UTC 2009

On Tue 10/20/09 09:58 AM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:

<q>
Yeah! I remember that longer version too. ISTR that I saw it xeroxed and taped over the copying machine in our departmental office in the mid '70s.

>From NewspaperArchive:

George Robeson, "Salty Philosophy from a rough sea," _Independent_  (Long Beach, Calif.), Nov. 5, 1974, p. B3:

"Gil Poe...works a tugboat....[There] was  a bit of carefully framed prose, hung in the wheelhouse of his boat. 'We, the willing [sic: JL]...led by the unknowing...are doing the impossible...for the ungrateful.

" 'We have been doing so much for so long with so little that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.'"

"It's okay to copy that and use it in your own shop. It isn't a copyright of Pacific Tow Boat and Salvage."
</q>

Yes, I believe that the quote you gave (except for the sic) (sea-sic?) was the text of the professionally-printed placard I saw in the Pentagon.

OT:  interesting that the newspaper article refers to a "tugboat" but the company that owns the boat is "Pacific Tow Boat and Salvage".  I suspect a landlubber mistake on the part of the reporter.  In the Mississippi valley a boat that propels barges is a "towboat" and to call it a "tugboat" gets you laughed at.  Does Port of Long Beach handle barges as well as ships?  I can imagine a salvage company owning its own fleet of barges to use in its work.  If the company also operated tugboats, it would, for advertising, include the word "tug" in its name.  ("Pacific Tow and Tug"?)

While in every other context "to tow" means "to pull", with barges "to tow" means "to push", since a "towboat" always pushes the barges from the rear.  A group of barges tied together to be moved somewhere, or moving somewhere, is a "tow of barges".  I suspect this usage dates back to when steam-powered towboats did not yet exist and barges were "towed" (in this care, unambiguously pulled) by mules.

Similarly for "to tug".  MWCD10 defines tug at "to pull hard; to pull or strain hard at; to move by pulling hard, haul".  Compare "tug of war".  Again, a tugboat does not pull, it pushes.

     - Jim Landau

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