act definition, into the cold mists
of the prehistoric Baltic, and to the Greek Islands, among the shadows
of the men who first found the courage to lose sight of the hills.
Commonly they are short words, smoothed by constant use till they might
be imagined to be born of the circumstances in which they are known, like
the gulls and the foam of the wake. They carry like detonations in a
gale. Yet quite often such words, when they are verbs, were once of the
common stock of the language, as in the case of "belay," and it has
happened that the sailor alone has been left to keep them alive. Dr.
Johnson seems not to have known the meaning of the verb "to belay" among
the other things he did not know but was very violent about. He thought
it was a sea-phrase for splicing a rope, just as he supposed "main-sheet"
was the largest sail of a ship.

The _Sailors' Word Book_ would be much more interesting than it is,
though greatly heavier, if the derivation of the words were given, or
even guessed at, a method which frequently makes the livelier story. We
begin to understand what a long voyage our ship has come when we are told
that "starboard" is steer-board, the side to which the steering-paddle
was made fast before the modern rudder was invented in the fourteenth
century. Skeat informs us that both steor and bord are Anglo-Saxon; in
fact, the latter word is the same in all the Celtic and Teutonic
languages, so was used by those who first cut trees in Western Europe,
and perhaps was here before they arrived to make our civilization what we
know it. The opposite to starboard was larboard; but for good reason the
Admiralty substituted port for larboard in 1844. Why was the left side of
a ship called the port side? That term was in use before the Admiralty
adopted it. It has been suggested that, as the steering-paddle was on the
right side of a ship, it was good seamanship to have the harbour or port
on the left hand when piloting inwards. But it is doubtful if that reason
was devised by a sailor.

A few words in sea life--as fish, mere, and row--are said to be so old
that the philologists refer them to the Aryans, or, as others might say,
give them up as a bad job. These words appear to be common to all the
sons of Adam who preferred adventurous change to security in monotony,
and so signed on as slaves to a galley. Anchor we imported from the
Greeks--it is declared to be the oldest word from the Mediterranean in
the language of o