[单词大师] 第40课：Maritime Terms

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SFX: Sounds of seagulls, ship horn

AA: Im Avi Arditti, with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the catch of the day, terms from the sea.

Lots of nautical expressions have washed ashore into everyday English. Alan Hartley researches them for the Oxford English Dictionary -- that is, when hes not supervising the loading of grain onto foreign ships in the Great Lakes. We called him at his office in Minnesota, and immediately made headway.

HARTLEY: "When you make headway, youre making progress forward. Way is usually the forward motion of a ship. It could also be rearward motion, and that was called sternway. But there are a lot of analogous terms in English that never made it into the general vocabulary. Headway and sternway are a good example of a pair, one of which made it and the other didnt."

AA: Maritime metaphors lend themselves to all kinds of situations on land. Lets say youre making headway on that big project at work, going "full steam ahead." Its all "smooth sailing" toward that big promotion. Or so it seems.

All of a sudden youre "weathering a storm." You reach the "end of your rope" (anchor rope, that is). You look for "safe harbor." You "go overboard" to make things better. The last thing you want is to "scuttle" your career and wind up "on the rocks," all because youve "run afoul" of the boss.

HARTLEY: "If you encountered another ship accidentally, you got too close to it, maybe you got tangled in its anchor cable, in that case you have run afoul of the other ship and had an accident, essentially."

AA: "And today we might talk about to run afoul of the law."

HARTLEY: "Sure, exactly. Its a very typical case of the extension into everyday English. And it shows that, you know, the word would be kicking around in nautical use for a few decades and gradually it would be picked up in general use."

RS: "Some of these words I find interesting because I didnt even know that they were maritime words."

HARTLEY: "Same for me. High and dry, for instance, is something you say all the time. A ship got stuck on the mud flats or on a reef, the tide went out and the ship was left high and dry."

RS: "Well, heres an expression I never associated with the seas, usually associated with my doctor. When I go to the doctor I really like to come out with a clean bill of health."