Most amateurish this venture,I fear,shall be mine,especially to them in whose veins there flows a sea for long.Yet,let me indulge in this luxury.
The Random House Dictionary of English Language,accepted to be the best and the most voluminous in the global industry of lexicography,encases just two short of one hundred words pertaining to the sea.After all,the`sea'is more a concept than a word, and we know a word is only the child of a concept.Side by side,The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations lists no less than eighty-three most popular occasions when writers had to resort to the concept of the sea in their literary contextualities,either literally or meta-
phorically.Indeed,the sea is all about us.I am convinced,while approximating the sublimi-
mity of Shakespeare in the tiny garb of a sonnet,why M Arnold imaged the Bard as a sea,bottomlessly deep and limitlessly vast and yet ejaculated this way in awe and wonder:"Others abide our question thou art free!"
Greenough and Kittredge,the first,a Professor of Latin and the second,of English,both of Harvard University,in their`Words and Their Ways in English Speech'
speak of the following terms relating to the sailor/sea,many of which must have by now gone archaic due to the onslaught of their modern technical synonyms or their becoming too cliches for to-day's marine use.Any way,here is the list:
1)Hospital Ship:meaning`a place of quarantine'alludes to Lazaret,a hospi-
tal for lepers in memory of Lazarus in the sixteenth chapter of St.Luke.
2)Cockpit:the place to which the wounded are carried during a seafight.
3)Sick Bay:a nautical figure
4)Holystones:the stones with which the decks are scrubbed,owes its origin in jest.Sailors go down on their knees to scrub.
5)Sea-terms in common figurative use are-headway,leeway,under way,
coast,steer clear of,clear the decks,on deck,lee shore,head flaw,anchor,take the helm,to ship,to unship,cargo,to lighten ship,to weather the storm a safe harbour,to run aground
to founder,to suffer shipwreck,a castway,piratical,to scuttle,taken aback,aboard,to jet-
tision,and many others.
6)Admiral:fomerly`amiral',is an Arabic derivative;in`admiral'the final syllable is again the Arabic article,the word being a fragment of the phrase`amir-al-bahr'
commander of the sea.
7)Companion-way:as a nautical term, is a corruption(under the influence of the ordinary word)of the French`chambre a la compagne'or the Italian`camera della compagna'which meantthe`pantry'or`storeroom'on a ship's deck.Perhaps the English word passed through the Dutch language,(`kompanje'),whence so many sailors' terms have come.
8)Captain:is French,from Latin`capitaneus'.An older French form from the same is`chevetain',which gives us`chieftain'.
All said,the sea is yet boundless in our estimate,this sublimest of the sublime children of Nature.Hence the following from a Victorian poet:
"Though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,
Still,leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea!"
- December 13, 2008 7:18 pm
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