Mind your language
NOW THAT a decent interval has passed, it is possible to comment on the difficulty that newsreaders had with the word bow after the sinking of the Esto- nia. Even the best occasionally stumbled over it, making bow-doors sound like bow-windows.
Bow is a late-corner to the language, being recorded only after 1600; it seems to be related to the bough of a tree (not to a bow and arrow), and is, of course, pronounced in the same way. Both apparently derive from a word in the Teutonic languages which meant 'shoul- der', though such a meaning is no longer present in English. There is no connection with bow, as in rainbow.
The funny thing is that bowline, a nautical term, is found hundreds of years earlier, and the bow is pronounced as in Bow Street. It is a rope which fas- tens the upright edge on the weather side of a square sail to the port or star- board bow. Very necessary too. Sailing on a bowline means sailing close to the wind. A bowline is also short for the kind of knot used to secure bowlines.
And the ballad Tom Bowling, about a mariner, figures in du Maurier's won- derful and absurd novel Trilby. Ratling the Reefer is the eponymous hero of another 19th-century novel, and would have made his way up the shrouds (some of the ropes that hold up the masts) by way of the ratlings or ratlines that stretch between them. Reefer was a colloquial term for midshipman (as is snotty) and a reefer would on occasion wear a reefer-jacket, though not neces- sarily smoke reefers.
I think I've got all that right, but ship's vocabulary is damned puzzling. Even Dr Johnson thought that sheets were sails, but they are ropes too.
Dot Wordsworth
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