Monday, August 16, 2021

Word of the Day -- Deep-Six

 This one comes courtesy of my friend Kenneth, who used it yesterday.  Kenneth is a lover of words as well, and often comes up with words that I tend to mentally write down.  I know of this word and I knew some of it's meaning, but not much of it's history.  The info below comes from Merriam Webster:

Deep-Six:  to discard, get rid of; slang: to throw overboard.

Before the introduction of shipboard sonar, water depth was measured by hand with a sounding line. This was generally a rope weighted at one end, with bits of leather called marks tied on at intervals to measure the fathoms. Between the marks, fathoms were estimated by deeps. The leadsman (pronounced LEDZ-mun) lowered the line into the water and called out the depth as the rope passed through his hands: "By the mark twain!" at two fathoms; "By the deep six!" at six fathoms. Perhaps due to an association with "six feet under" (dead and buried), to give something the deep six (or to deep-six it) was to throw it overboard, or, by extension, to discard it. In the mid-20th century, deep-six made landfall; since then it has been used as much by landlubbers as by old salts.

Aren't words cool???

Happy Monday folks...



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