Most of life is vamping – a jazz term meaning jumping on a riff and trying to harmonize until you find the melody. Even if your life is regular and same-same, every day is infinitely different. Rain, breeze, squirrels on the roof, crows being sarcastic in your sycamore tree, different. But we’re good at vamping. Fresh experience doesn’t shock us; we don’t fall to pieces and rush back to bed. We relate a morning phenomenon with something similar, then soldier on toward lunch. It’s in our DNA to make connections and rational paths, and to remake them when the rational runs out. It’s a human skill.

But this is why some language gets fudged. We relate new speech with the tone of voice we’ve heard in another context, or with a similar expression from Aunt Edith, and we custom tailor new material into our own experience, tuck a random phrase into our vocabulary. Sometimes the bum etymology is obscure – where did this chunk of speech come from? We’ve cobbled up our language from old unfamiliar sources and made source assumptions that fit our contemporary lives. We vamp.

A bushel of our most familiar phrases have a tang of salt water, even if we’re far from shore. Sailor talk migrated to street gab. Why? I can only speculate that sailors are by and large (a salty term) show-offs and smart-asses, and the grit in their salty talk was so appealing that it stuck in ears ashore. 

What may sound eminently terrestrial can have a nautical beginning. Case in point: You’ve got me over a barrel!

You may fix on the precarious situation of being suspended with poorly knotted string over a deep, dark barrel. Perhaps even a barrel of eels (of which more anon). But the etymology of this phrase is official and threatening, especially to snotties.

A snotty was a young person aboardship, often (in the Royal Navy, prime seedbed for many phrases) a midshipman, an officer in training. A midshipman might be as young as ten or as old as twenty, though a proper snotty was on the young end of the scale. 

When jack tar (any common sailor) committed an offense, he was punished vigorously on deck, commonly by a number of lashes from the cat-o-nine-tails (nine cords, each knotted three times, ouch). Midshipmen were also punished but, because they represented authority to the crew, the corporal punishment was carried out in private, in the wardroom where officers were berthed, or in the skipper’s quarters. The offending young person wasn’t visited by the cat but by the schoolmaster’s rod, usually a light bamboo switch on the bare bottom. To facilitate this procedure and to ensure accurate work, the offender was tied across the barrel of a ship’s gun. Both the wardroom and the captain’s day room featured guns starboard and larboard.

You see now that being over a barrel was not so much possible peril, but certain and likely-deserved punishment. When a midshipman was over a barrel the situation was inevitable.

The cat was a more damaging and serious punishment involving actual blood loss rather than welts, so the lighter midshipman’s punishment was a mercy. This brings us to another bit of nautical etymology, however. The cat-o-nine-tails was ceremoniously kept by the bosun in a red baize (woolen material with a felt-like nap) bag. If offenses had been committed and punishment was coming, one tar might shake his head to a tie-mate (the friend who helped him braid his pigtail) “Blimey, mate, the cat is out of the bag!”

Adkins: 17 May 25