port / larboard / starboard

28 March 2022

Detail of the Bayeux Tapestry showing Harold Godwinson sailing to France in two ships with rudders on the starboard (Old English steorboard) side of the ships. A section of an embroidered cloth depicting two sailing vessels, filled with people, with rudders on the right side.

In nautical jargon, starboard refers to the right side of a ship, as one is facing the bow, and larboard and port refer to the left side. But why these terms are used and how they may have come about are not obvious to present-day speakers of English.

Old English steorboard is a compound meaning a ship’s rudder, that is a board for steering. Prior to the fourteenth century it was common for a ship’s rudder to be on the right side, as opposed to over the stern, of the vessel. The right side was typical because most people are right-handed, and it was easier for the helmsman to control the rudder if it was on the right. The corresponding term for the left side of the ship was bæcbord, i.e., backboard, a reference to the back of the helmsman. We see this use in a late ninth-century translation of Orosius’s history:

Wulfstan sæde þæt he gefore of Hæðum, þæt he wære on Truso on syfan dagum and nihtum, þæt þæt scip wæs ealne weg yrnende under segle. Weonoðland him wæs on steorbord, and on bæcbord him wæs Langaland and Læland and Falster and Sconeg, and þas land eally hyrað to Denemearcan.

(Wulfstan said that he went from Hedeby, that he arrived in Truso in seven days and nights with the ship under sail the entire way. The land of the Wends was to starboard and to backboard were Langeland, Laaland, Falster, and Skåne, which all belong to Denmark.

Bæcbord fell out of use in the transition to Middle English, but starboard survived, even after right-sided rudders fell out of use in the fourteenth century.

The Middle-English replacement for bæcbord was laddeboard, which in Present-Day spelling is larboard. This too is a compound, but what ladde- refers to is unknown. One plausible suggestion is that it is related to lade (Old English hladan), a reference to cargo being taken onboard on the left side, the rudder being on the right making it difficult for the ship to dock on that side. Or it could be from the verb geledan (to lead), a reference to the left-hand side leading the ship, the rudder being on the other side. The shift from the / d / to an / ɹ /, i.e., from laddeboard to larboard, occurred in the sixteenth century, probably through association with starboard.

Larboard appears in the poem Patience, by the Pearl poet, written c.1380. The passage is part of the telling of the biblical story of Jonah:

Then he tron on þo tres, and þay her tramme ruchen,
Cachen vp þe crossayl, cables þay fasten,
Wiȝt at þe wyndas weȝem her ankres,
Spende spak to þe sprete þe spare bawelyne,
Gederen to þe gyde-ropes, þe grete cloþ falles,
Þay layden in on laddeborde, and þe lofe wynnes,
Þe blyþe breþe at her bak þe bosum he fyndes.

(Then he stepped onto the ship, and they prepare her tackle,
Hoist the mainsail, fasten the cables,
Quickly at the windlass weigh their anchors,
Attach the spare bowline to the bowsprit,
Gather the guy-ropes, the great canvas falls,
They lead to larboard, and gain the luff,
The fair breath at their back finds the bosum of the sail.)

Given that larboard might be a reference to receiving cargo, one is tempted to associate port with the idea that it is the side next to the quay. But the nautical term actually comes from the sense of port meaning a gate or entrance, borrowed from French porte and that from the Latin porta. In his three-volume dissertation on Middle English nautical jargon, Bertil Sandhal explains the term thusly:

The ME. nautical sense [of port] was “entry port,” “opening in a ship’s side for entrance and for the loading of cargo,” at least that is the only attested use so far. This does not mean, however, that ports were not pierced for other purposes, such as light, ventilation, etc. We know from pictures that forecastles and summer-castles had a great number of ports, apparently without any form of shutter. In a miniature of 1482 seven guns are shown pointing through apertures in the bulwarks. An invention by a Frenchman in 1501 introduced the method of piercing gun-ports in the actual side of the ship.

And:

The entry port was cut on the larboard, or port side of the ship. This is no doubt the origin of port (first evidenced in 1543–4) as a term of direction, for earlier larboard. [...] As long as the rudder remained on the starboard quarter, the port side would naturally be turned towards the quay or wharf in landing in order to prevent the rudder from being damaged, and cargo would be received on board and loaded on that side.

We see just such a use of port, to mean an opening in a ship’s side, in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession), written c.1390. From the portion of that poem that tells the tale of Constance (the tale may be familiar as it is also the subject of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale). Here Constance is about to be raped, but is miraculously saved:

This knyht withoute felaschipe
Hath take a bot and cam to schipe,
And thoghte of hire his lust to take,
And swor, if sche him daunger make,
That certeinly sche scholde deie.
Sche sih ther was non other weie,
And seide he scholde hire wel conforte,
That he ferst loke out ate porte,
That no man were nyh the stede,
Which myhte knowe what thei dede,
And thanne he mai do what he wolde.
He was riht glad that sche so tolde,
And to the porte anon he ferde.
Sche preide God, and He hire herde,
And sodeinliche he was out throwe
And dreynt, and tho began to blowe
A wynd menable fro the lond,
And thus the myhti Goddes hond
Hire hath conveied and defended.

(This knight without fellowship
Took a boat and came to the ship,
And thought to take her for his lust,
And swore, if she should cause trouble for him,
That she would certainly die.
She sighed there was no other way,
And said he should for their assurance,
That he should first look out a port,
So that no one was nearby,
Who might know what they did,
And then he might do what he would,
He was very happy that she said that,
And he then went to the port.
She prayed to God, and God heard her,
And suddenly he was thrown overboard
And drowned, and then began to blow
A favorable wind from the land,
And thus the mighty hand of God
Had conveyed and defended her.)

Larboard remained in common use until the nineteenth century when it was replaced by port, although it is still used in some quarters. The Royal Navy standardized the use of port to refer to the left side of a ship with the following order that was issued on 2 November 1844:

It having been represented to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, that the word “port” is frequently, though not universally, substituted on board Her Majesty’s ships for the word “larboard,” and as the want of a uniform practice in this respect may lead to important and serious mistakes, and the distinction between “starboard” and “port” is so much more marked than that between “starboard” and “larboard,” it is their Lordship’s direction that the word “larboard" shall no longer be used to signify left on board on of Her Majesty’s ships or vessels.

But since larboard and port existed alongside one another for centuries, one wonders whether confusion between larboard and starboard was ever a significant problem. If it had been, the substitution would likely have occurred much earlier. More likely a simple desire for standardization was the driving force behind the shift.

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Sources:

Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, fourth edition. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2002, lines 101–27, 190.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. bæc-bord, n., hladan, v.

Godden, Malcolm R., ed. The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 1.1.23, 44.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis, vol. 2 of 3, second edition. Russel A. Peck and Andrew Galloway, eds. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013, lines 1107–25.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. ladde-board, n., port(e, n.

The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle for 1845. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1845, 37. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2016, s.v. starboard, n. adj., and adv.; second edition, 1989, back-board, n., larboard, n. (and adv.) and adj.

Sandahl, Bertil. Middle English Sea Terms, I. The Ship’s Hull, vol. 1 of 3. Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature 8. Upsala: Lundequistska, 1951, 200.

Image credit: Bayeux Museum. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

Ohio

Detail of a map by George Washington that accompanied his 1753 “Journal to the Ohio.” A hand-drawn map showing a portion of the course of the Ohio River.

25 March 2022

The name Ohio is from the Seneca (Iroquoian) name for the Allegheny-Ohio River, ohi:yo, literally meaning good river. The Seneca name came to English via French.

The name appears in English-language discourse in reference to René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle’s 1669 expedition, although historians today are skeptical of the claims that La Salle actually ever reached the Ohio River valley. Regardless of the truth of the claim, the name Ohio, in reference to the river, appears in a 1698 translation of Louis Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. Hennepin had accompanied La Salle on the expedition. It first appears with the spelling Hohio:

The Savages came to meet us, repeating often this Word Otchitagon, meaning by it, that the Bare-foot was return’d from the great Voyage he had undertook, to visit the Nations that are beyond the River Hohio and Meschasipi; and tho’ our Faces were burnt by the Sun, and my Clothes patch’d up with wild Bull-Skins, yet they knew me, and carry’d me with my two Men into one of their Officer’s Cottages.

Later in the book, in a section titled “An Account of M. la Salle’s Voyage to the River Mississippi,” it is spelled Ohio:

The Country between the Lake of the Illinois and the Lake Erie, is a row of Mountains for a hundred Leagues together, from whence spring a great number of Rivers, which run to the Westward into the Lake of the Illinois, to the North into the Lake Huron, to the East into the Lake Erie, and to the South into the River Ohio.

Use of the name Ohio to refer to the region was in place by the middle of the eighteenth century. It appears in an account of treaty negotiations between the English and the Iroquois at Lancaster, Pennsylvania on 2 July 1744. The name appears in reference to a discussion of the deaths of three Indigenous people at the hands of settler-colonists and is also of interest because of the formalities of the discussion and the use of wampum belts as commemorative items and records of the event:

Brother Onas,

These Things happen frequently, and we desire you will consider them well, and not be too much concerned. Three Indians have been killed at different Times at Ohio, and we never mentioned any of them to you, imagining it might have been occasioned by some unfortunate Quarrels, and being unwilling to create a Disturbance. We therefore desire you will consider these Things well, and to take the Grief from your Heart, we give you this String of Wampum.

Which was received with the usual Ceremonies.

The reply by George Thomas, deputy governor of Pennsylvania reads:

Brethren,

I have considered this Matter well before I came from Philadelphia, and I advised with the Council there upon it, as I have done here with the honourable the Commissioners of Virginia and Maryland. I never heard before of the Murder of the three Indians at Ohio; had Complaint been made to me of it, and it had appeared to have been committed by any of the People under my Government, they should have been put to Death, as two of them were, some Years ago, for killing two Indians.

The territory that now forms the state of Ohio was acquired by the British from the French in 1763, following the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War). Ohio, formed out of the Northwest Territory, became the seventeenth state in 1803.

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Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Hennepin, Louis. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. London: M. Bentley, et al., 1698, 275, 311–12. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2004, s.v. Ohio, n.

A Treaty Held at the Town of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, by the Honourable the Commissioners of the Provinces of Virginia and Maryland, with the Indians of the Six Nations, in June 1744. Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1744, 27, 28. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). [The title of the work says June, but the portion from which the quotations are taken is dated 2 July 1744.)

Image credit: George Washington, 1753. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

poop / poop deck

The poop deck of the replica ship HMS Surprise, a re-creation of 24-gun Royal Navy frigate housed at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. A view looking aft on a replica of an eighteenth/nineteenth century frigate.

23 March 2022

When children learn that the raised deck at the stern of the ship is known as the poop, they, and some adults as well, cannot help but giggle. Poop, of course, is also nursery verb meaning to defecate and a noun meaning fecal matter. But the two senses are from quite different sources. And complicating things, poop can also mean information, especially high-quality, reliable rumor from a knowledgeable source. (There are other sense as well, but for now I’m restricting this entry to these three.)

Poop, meaning the stern of a ship, comes from the Middle French pupe, and that in turn eventually comes from the classical Latin puppis, although the trail from Latin to French is muddy, perhaps passing through the Italian poppa or the Old Occitan popa. In Britain, the word is recorded in Anglo-Norman from 1338 in an inventory of a nautical storehouse:

Un grant ankre apelle le tyntawe, un pere vambras feble, un powpe ove le fforechastiell pour les ministraux partenauntz a la barge del hostiel notre tres redoubte (Seigneur le Roi), un petit barell de gonpouder le quart’ plein.

(A great anchor called the tyntawe, a pair of poor/damaged vambraces, a poop together with the forecastle for piloting/commanding belonging to the barge from the household of our very redoubtable lord king, a small barrel of gunpowder a quarter full.)

Tyntawe is mysterious; it may be a reference to the name of the foundry that made the anchor.

This nautical sense of poop appears in English by the beginning of the fifteenth century.

The sense meaning to defecate got its start as an echoic term, poop being likened to the sounding of a horn. This use has cognates in Dutch and Middle Low German and appears in English by the end of the fourteenth century, one example being in Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. In the passage in Chaucer’s tale, the fox has caught the rooster, Chauntecleer, and is running away with him in his mouth. The entire farmyard is aroused and gives chase:

Of bras they broghten bemes, and of box,
Of horn, of boon, in whiche they blewe and powped,
therwithal they skriked and they howped.
It semed as that hevene sholde falle.

(They brought trumpets of brass, and of box-wood,
Of horn, of bone, in which they blew and pooped,
And with that they shrieked and they whooped.
It seemed as if heaven should fall.)

By the end of the seventeenth century, this sense had evolved to also mean to fart. From the 1689 lexicon Gazophylacium Anglicanum:

To Poop, from the Belg. Poepen, to fart softly; both from the sound.

And the nursery sense meaning to defecate is first recorded in an 1882 Cornish dictionary by Frederick Jago:

Poop, or Poopy. To go to stool. (Said by children.)

(A few years later, Jago would mistakenly attribute this use of poop to “ancient Cornish.”)

The sense of information originates in the slang of the US Military Academy at West Point. There it meant information that was to be learned by rote, presumably to be regurgitated on demand. As such, it may come from the sense of blowing a horn, as mindlessly intoning words without any regard to meaning. From a glossary in the 1904 West Point yearbook The Howitzer:

Poop—To spec blind; to memorize completely.
Poop Deck—A small porch on the guard house used as a point of observation by the O.C. [i.e., Officer in Charge]

The inclusion of the naval poop deck is interesting, given the army source, and may or may not be related to the verb to poop. And there is this entry from the 1907 edition of the yearbook that explains spec and adds some additional information about what poop meant:

poop, v. To memorize a subject (including commas). Syn., spec.
poop-deck, n. The O.C.’s observation station.

[...]

speck, v. (from Lt. “specio,” to look at). To absorb print, to commit something to memory without understanding it.

From West Point, it entered US Army slang, and the general sense of poop meaning information appears in print during World War II. From Charles Bond’s A Flying Tiger’s Diary, the entry for 25 February 1942. The Flying Tigers, officially the First American Volunteer Group, were American pilots who flew combat missions against the Japanese in China during 1941–42; the Flying Tigers were integrated into the US Army Air Forces shortly after US entry into the war:

We do things over here that would surely draw court-martials at home. Also we are flying aircraft that would be condemned back in the States.

We’re sending Bill Bartling to Kunming with complete poop on the situation here for the Old Man. We want some P-40 replacements that will not drop 200 RPM on one-magneto check before takeoff. Some of the pilots have gone to Cairo, Egypt, to pick up P-40E replacements for us. Hope they bring them here. But I have an idea that Chennault will re-equip the Third Squadron with them and rotate us and replace us with that squadron.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v. powpe.

Bond, Charles R. and Terry Anderson. A Flying Tiger’s Diary. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M UP, 1984, 109–10.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 3398–3401. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Gazophylacium Anglicanum. London: E.H. and W.H., 1689, sig. T3v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Glossary.” Howitzer. US Military Academy, 1907, 309.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. poop, n.2, poop, n.4, poop, v.2.

Jago, Frederick. W.P. The Ancient Language and the Dialect of Cornwall. Truro: Netherton and Worth, 1882, 322. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. An English–Cornish Dictionary. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1887. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. poupen, v., poupe, n.(2), tintawe.  

Nicolas, Nicholas Harris. A History of the Royal Navy, vol. 2 of 2. London: Richard Bentley, 1847, 476. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, poop, v.1, poop, n.1 and int., poop, n.2, poop, n.5.

“West Point Slang.” Howitzer. US Military Academy, 1904, 222.

Williams, Robert. Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum: A Dictionary of the Ancient Celtic Language. of Cornwall. London: Trubner, 1865, 40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo Credit: BrokenSphere, 2009. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Nebraska

21 March 2022

An 1843 map of the “Nebraska or Platte River,” as it flows through what is now Nebraska and Wyoming

The state of Nebraska takes its name from the Indigenous name for the river, Nibraska (Omaha) or Nibrathka (Otoe), from /ɳi/ (water) + /braska/ or /bráθge/ (flat/shallow), that is “shallow river.” The French translated the Indigenous name as the Rivière Platte (Platte River), the name the river bears in English to this day.

Indigenous peoples who have lived in present-day Nebraska include the Omaha, Missouria, Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe, Apache, and Lakota. Currently, the federally recognized tribes in Nebraska are the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, Sac & Fox Nation of Missouri, Santee Sioux Nation, and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.

Perhaps because of the existing French name for the river, the name Nebraska makes its way into English discourse relatively late. Reference to the river appears in Washington Irving’s 1836 Astoria; or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains:

On the 28th, they breakfasted on one of the islands which lie at the mouth of the Nebraska or Platte river; the largest tributary of the Missouri, and about six hundred miles above its confluence with the Mississippi.

Use of Nebraska as a name for the territory appears by 1843 in a map created by John C. Frémont and in 1844 in a report by the US War Department, ten years before the territory was formally organized:

A territorial organization of the country, and a military force placed on the very summit whence flow all the great streams of the North American continent either into the Gulf of Mexico, or the Pacific Ocean, would no longer leave our title to the Oregon Territory a barren or untenable claim. Its possession and occupancy would thenceforth not depend upon the naval superiority on the Pacific ocean. Troops and supplies from the projected Nebraska Territory would be able to contend for its possession with any force coming from the sea.

The United States acquired the territory that is now Nebraska from the French in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the organized Territory of Nebraska, which originally included the territory that is now the state plus most of what is now Wyoming and Montana and portions of Colorado and North and South Dakota. Over the next decade, the Colorado, Dakota, and Idaho territories were formed, reducing the Territory of Nebraska to its present size. Nebraska became the thirty-seventh state in 1867.

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Sources:

[22 March 2022: Corrected a source.]

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Irving, Washington. Astoria; or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains, vol. 1 of 3. London: Richard Bentley, 1836, 262. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2003, s.v. Nebraskan, adj. and n.

“Report of the Secretary of War,” 30 November 1844. In Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress, Doc. No. 2, House of Representatives, 28th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: Blair and Rives, 3 December 1844, 124. Google Books.

“Report of the Secretary of War.” Alexandria Gazette (Virginia), 6 December 1844, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: John C. Frémont, 1843. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

Arizona

Saguaro cactus on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson

18 March 2022

The name Arizona comes from the Oʼodham arizonac, meaning little spring or few springs. Oʼodham is an Uto-Aztecan language of southern Arizona and northern Sonora. The language is also known as Papago-Pima, but the Tohono Oʼodham people have rejected the name Papago as being insulting. That name is a Spanish variation of the Pima name for the people, Ba꞉bawĭkoʼa, meaning “eating tepary beans.”

The earliest use of the name Arizona in English that I have found is from the New Orleans Weekly Delta of 23 June 1849. The article indicates why the territory was attractive to the United States:

The silver mines of Sonora are also said to be of unequaled richness. It is alleged that lumps of pure silver have been discovered at Arizona weighing three thousand five hundred pounds (?)

Many believe the name Arizona comes from the Spanish arida (dry) + zona (area). While this is not the origin, this Spanish combination influenced the form and adoption of the word in both Spanish and English.

The territory of what is now the state of Arizona was once part of the Mexican state of Sonora. The United States acquired the territory north of the Gila River during the Mexican-American War of 1846–48 and the area south of the river in the Gadsen Purchase of 1854.

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Sources:

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Harder, Kelsie B. Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names: United States and Canada. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Tohono O'odham (Papago) Literature.” Indigenouspeople.net, 2019.

“Later from Mexico and California.” New Orleans Weekly Delta, 23 June 1849, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2018.