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[timepiececlock]

Be wary, young sailor,
Of wind and high water.
The sea has a secret,
The sea has a daughter.
She'll swim along starboard,*
And capture your heart.
With a flip of her tail-fin,
Underwater, depart.

~Unknown.


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**for those real landlubbers, 'starboard' is right (meaning 'port' is left)
It's hard for me to imagine anyone not knowing this, but then I take a lot of more obscure boat-speak for granted, so I figured I'd add this footnote just in case.

Random side note: did you know the verb to "deck" someone comes from sailors, who would punch someone hard-- and because sailors back in those days (and still some now) had massive arm muscles, that meant knocking them down on the deck of the ship with one swing. A girl in my class last year gave it as an example of figurative language, and my English teacher said it was slang, not f.l. Feh. What would she know about it anyway? yeah, teacher, but still. More than half of common slang IS figurative language. Just not pretty or eloquent kind of f.l.

Comments

Re:

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I learned it very similarly-- left is port because it has four letters; right is starboard because they're the longer words-- and also, the one that's not port/left, so default to right.