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You are welcome to apply any part of this article to your own personal use. Please do NOT publish any part of the article or apply any part of it to any non-personal use without the express written concent of the author.
Last time we talked about "the whole nine yards" and "dressed to the nines" as related terms originating from the sea. Here are more related Sailor Talk: "shake a leg," "son of a gun" and "cockpit."
C'mon... Certainly "cockpit" is a nautical term, but the others...? And all three related...? You bet.
On English warships of the 15th century to the early 19th century, it was not unknown to have women aboard. Common crew rarely got shore privileges. Consequently, when in their homeport they would not be allowed to visit their wives, sweethearts or their "professional" counterparts. Women would visit the sailors aboard ship, and not a few managed to stay aboard as the ship left port. The ship's captain would overlook this sort of behavior because having women aboard had a "placating" effect on the crew. They also were quite useful in other ways, as we shall soon see.
With that background, let's look at "shake a leg."
On those warships, there were no separate quarters for men and women. Women shared hammocks with sailors in the forecastle. Perhaps some of you have noticed that a man's leg looks a little different from a woman's leg. Certainly the mates aboard warships were capable of noticing the difference. So when they were rousting the watch up from below, they would yell "Show a leg!" If a woman's leg appeared from the hammock, the mate would not disturb her. If a man's leg appeared, the sailor had better be pretty quick at getting his leg and the rest of himself up on deck. Since "shake" connotes more movement than "show," it was natural for the mates to change "show a leg" to "shake a leg."
Now let's look at the source of "son of a gun."
Sailors being sailors, and women being women, sometimes a woman aboard would find herself in a family way. Now, sailors weren't particularly happy about having a woman giving birth while they were trying to sleep in the few hours allotted to them. And the woman herself would be wanting her privacy. The most private place aboard a warship of the times was on one of the gun decks between two of the guns. Thus, a woman would most often find her way to the gun decks when it was time for her labor.
If the labor was particularly difficult, or if the captain wanted to help things along in the final stages of delivery, he would call for a full broadside to be fired during a contraction. A full broadside would be powerful enough to instantly move the whole ship a foot or so sideways, and was believed to give the woman an extra "push." When the broadside helped to launch a baby boy, he would always be known as a "son of a gun."
There's another origin to "son of a gun." While ashore, many of the women on board the warships were practitioners of the world's oldest profession. As there were many more men than women in the forecastle, they were able to continue to practice their profession while aboard. Consequently, the paternity of the ship born child was not often known. Sailors, generally a crude lot, would customarily refer to a portion of their anatomy as a gun. Thus, the ship born boy may not have been known as the son of a particular sailor, but he would most certainly be a "son of a gun".
So we now see how "shake a leg" and "son of a gun" originated as seafaring terms, and are related by the presence of women aboard warships. How does "cockpit" come into this picture?
In the days when a warship was steered by tiller, and even later when the ship's wheel was developed, it was deemed a particularly unsafe thing to try to steer the ship in battle from on deck. The man doing the steering would always be a target, for if hit, there would be no one to steer for a short time and a great advantage would be had by the opponent. When rigging for battle, block and tackle would be rigged to the rudderpost below decks in the steerage to control the boat. The steerage was always below the waterline where the cannon balls could not penetrate the hull. That way, the helmsman would be protected in battle.
For similar reasons, the wounded would be brought down to the steerage. As the wounded bled a lot and the surgeon often didn't help that much, the steerage area became quite messy. To most of the sailors, who were known to engage in a bit of wagering from time to time, the steerage would begin to look like one of the places where they engaged in wagering - namely, the cock pit where cock fights took place. Thus, the place where one steered his vessel became known as the "cockpit."
Here's where women came into the picture, and why the captain often looked the other way when they were "sneaking" aboard. Women of the day had to be adept at needle and thread. During battle, the women would go down to the cockpit to tend to the wounded and help the surgeon sew up the wounded.
So there we have it, "shake a leg," "son of a gun" and "cockpit" as nautical terms that originated through women being aboard warships. I can hardly wait to find out what I'm going to write about next time.
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