Mind your language
'THEY won't let you put that in,' my husband said.
'Don't be silly, darling. It's a grownup magazine.'
I have to report my progress with the term cuntlines. (Anything like songlines?' asked my husband, intending to annoy.) My puzzlement began in March when one or possibly two readers from Burnham on Crouch sent a copy of a page from Practical Seamanship by John Todd and W.B. Whall (1904). 'Casks of liquid,' it says sternly, 'should be stowed level, bung up, bilge free, fore and aft, and bilge and cuntline on the upper tier.' Just so. But what can it mean?
I looked in The Sailor's Hand-Book by Admiral W.H. Smyth (descended, so his father liked to say, from Captain John Smith, the New England colonist, though not, as far as can be established, through Pocahontas, his deliverer, who married another settler). The HandBook was published after Smyth had shrugged off his stays, or whatever ships do, on 8 September 1865. Landlubbers' vagueness about seafarers' matters was treated with equanimity by the good admiral. 'Perhaps there was no harm in Dr Johnson's being utterly ignorant of maritime language,' he wrote, tut it was temerariously vain in that sturdy lexicographer to assert that belay is a seaphrase for splicing a rope; main-sheet for the largest sail in a ship; and bight for the circumference of a coil of rope.'
But what of the cuntline? I found it not and put the book aside. But this week, with the revival of interest in Patrick O'Brian, who often resorted to Smyth, I was turning through his HandBook again, and there were the cuntlines as large as life, except under cont-line. Silly of me not to have thought of looking there in the second place.
This is Smyth's definition: 'The space between the bilges of two casks stowed side by side.' This is all very well, as long as one knows that the bilge is the fattest part of the cask. To stow it bilge free, at bottom, sides and top, requires beds wedged off with quoins. The casks of the next tier up 'rest with their bilges in the cuntlines formed by the casks of the lower tier', as Todd and Whall point out.
Under the variant spelling, I found in the OED a variant meaning: The spiral intervals formed between the strands of a rope by their being twisted together.' This can, for whatever reason, be stuffed with spun yarn.
The OED has no idea of the etymology beyond mentioning that some point to cant, a word of venerably complicated history commented upon by Quintilian.
Dot Wordsworth
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