Trivia...Word and Phrase Origins

[V1cutsrfun]

Ok, I figured we all have heard various cliche's/words and accronyms, etc. Some are from our previous airlines, miltary squardrons,flight dept, each usually had the own meaning once upon a time, while others evolved over time from....?

Just curious about everyones personal collection from years of flyin' the line.

Mine's the "whole 9 yards" as I understand it, it comes from the .50 Caliber ammo belts of the P-51 being 27 feet long. If the pilot emptied his entire quatity at a target he "he gave'em the whole 9 yards".

Lets hear everyone else...This could be fun...

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[fr8doggie]

"The hat's in there somewhere..."

Previous life: a guy lost/someone stole his uniform cap. He tried to get the Company to pay for a replacement. When they refused he started writing "the hat's in there somewhere..." on the bottom of his expense reports. After a while everybody was saying "The hat's in there somewhere..." when they had to fill out their monthly report.

I guess you had to be there...

 

[_BravoWhiskey_]

I have no idea if this is true but:

Ptot= Pstat+Pdyn

hence pitot tube

 

[Quillpig]

I have no idea if this is true but:

Ptot= Pstat+Pdyn

hence pitot tube

I suspect that Henri Pitot is not pleased.

 

[V1cutsrfun]

Another one that I had heard was "kick the tires, light the fires". Many years ago I had the privalege to meet a former B-58 Hustler pilot while going to LA. He talked alot about the B58 as I was naturally curious about the airplane. After a while he stated that the phrase originated with this airplane as it was the "first" aircraft that had multi disc brakes. During preflight the pilot would kick the tires and listen to the brakes jingle. If no sound was observed the last landing welded the assembies together.

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[Patriot328]

Cockpit

This is a rather strange choice to denote the pilot's compartment on an airplane, but once the semantic history of the word is known, all becomes clear.
Cockpit originally referred to a place for cock-fighting, literally a pit for fighting cocks. Thomas Churchyard writes in The Worthines of Wales (1587):

The Mountaynes stand . . . In roundnesse such as it a Cock pit were.​

Shakespeare used the word to refer to a theater and in the 17th century there was theater in London with that name. From Henry V (1599):

Can this Cock-Pit hold The vastie fields of France? Or may we cramme Within this Woodden O, the very Caskes That did affright the Ayre at Agincourt?​

In the 18th century, cockpit entered naval jargon, denoted the junior officer quarters on the lowest, or orlop, deck of a ship that doubled for the surgeon's hospital during battle. Presumably, this was because the midshipmen, like roosters, would get into fights with one another. From William Falconer's 1769 An Universal Dictionary of the Marine:

Cock-pit of a ship of war, the apartments of the surgeon and his mates, being the place where the wounded men are dressed.​

In 1914, the term was applied to airplanes; from the Reports and Memoranda of the Advisory Committee on Aeronautics:

There are several speed indicators . . . in which the pressure of the air in the cockpit is allowed to act on one side of the recording diagram.​

So the literal sense gave way to a naval metaphor, which was later applied to airplanes.
(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

 

[Patriot328]

Black Box

When an airplane crashes, what follows is inevitably a search for the black box, or more accurately the two black boxes, one that records the voice conversations in the cockpit and the other that records data about the flight, such as location, speed, and altitude. The odd thing is that whenever the boxes are recovered and shown on the news, they are not black at all. Rather, they are painted bright orange for visibility at a crash site.
So why are they called black? Black box is a generic term for a piece of electronic equipment on an aircraft. The term originated in air force slang during World War II. The first black boxes were radar bomb "sights." Partridge's Dictionary of R.A.F. Slang (1945) contains the following entry:

Black box or gen box, instrument that enables bomb-aimer to see through clouds or in the dark.​

The term was also used by US air forces during the war. Hamann's Air War (1945) defines black box as radar.
Later, the term expanded to include various electronic navigational devices. When the flight recorders started being installed on civilian aircraft in 1958, the name was applied to these devices. The original WWII black boxes were literally colored black and many pieces of avionics equipment still come in black housings, but the term is applied to all of them regardless of color.
There is another type of black box that also takes its name from these WWII devices. A black box can be a mechanism whose internal workings are not understood, but its function is. If an engineer knows that the device will give output Y if he inputs X but doesn't understand why, then that is a black box. The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society records this from 1953:

As far as the layman is concerned, a phantastron is a ‘black box’ which will divide the frequency of its output pulses by any integral number between 2 and 20.​

This sense is from the fact that aircrews did not understand how their black boxes worked (the components and processes were closely guarded military secrets), they just knew they did.

 

[Patriot328]

Balls To The Wall

The phrase balls to the wall, meaning an all-out effort, comes from the world of aviation. On an airplane, the handles controlling the throttle and the fuel mixture are often topped with ball-shaped grips, referred to by pilots as (what else?) "balls." Pushing the balls forward, close to the front wall of the cockpit increases the amount of fuel going to the engines and results in the highest possible speed. The earliest written citation is from 1966-67, appearing in Harvey's Air War:

You know what happened on that first Doomsday Mission (as the boys call a big balls-to-the-wall raid) against Hanoi oil.​

Several Korean War-era veterans have written me noting their use of the term during their service. The phrase may very well date to this earlier war, although we have no written evidence for it.
There are two common misconceptions about the phrase. The first is that it is a reference to a part of the male anatomy.
The second is that it arose in railroad work. A speed governor on train engines would have round, metal weights at the end of arms. As the speed increased, the spinning balls would rise--being perpendicular to the walls at maximum speed. But there is no evidence to support this story. No use of the phrase is known to exist prior to the mid-1960s, and all the early cites are from military aviation.

 

[Patriot328]

Sorry I'm wastin bandwidth with all this, but some of these are interesting..

Bogey

Bogey is a term that today is usually only heard in the air force or on the golf course. Both these aviation usages date to World War II, but the term bogey is much, much older, coming from an old Scottish word for a ghost.
That word is Bogle, often spelled bogy, bogil, bogie, and other ways. The term dates at least to 1505, in William Dunbar's Tua mariit wemen and the wedo (Two married women and the widow):

The luif blenkis of that bogill, fra his blerde ene.​

Bogle is the source for our modern bogeyman or boogieman.
Up in the wild, blue yonder it is a reference to an unidentified aircraft that is presumably hostile. The term dates to World War II. Loosbrock's and Skinner's Wild Blue from 1943 says:

Bogies coming. Direction southeast.​

And J. Bryan's Carrier from 1945 has:

A bandit is an enemy plane, whereas a bogey is merely . . . unidentified . . . However, "bogey" has now been extended to include both terms.​

On the links, a bogey is a score of one over par on a particular hole. According to the OED, this term was invented in 1890 by a certain Major Wellman at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club. He was playing against a Dr. Thomas Browne using the scratch value of each hole. Wellman, having difficulty beating the scratch score, claimed that he was playing against a bogey-man, a character in a popular song at the time. In American usage, bogey came to mean one over par. From Field magazine, January 1892:

A novelty was introduced in shape of a Bogey tournament for a prize... Fourteen couples started, but the Bogey defeated all.​

The sense meaning a score of one over par on a hole is from 1946, in Acree's Golf Simplified:

Bogey, a hole scored in one stroke over par.​

The verb form appears around 1948, the earliest cite in the OED being from Ben Hogan's Power Golf:

After he drove into the rough he bogeyed the hole and lost his advantage.​

So both the aviation and golf senses are usages representing phantoms, whether they be phantom planes or phantom players.

 

[Patriot328]

Buy The Farm

To buy the farm is to die, usually in a battle or aircraft accident. It has spawned several false explanations of its origin. The phrase as we know it dates to the 1950s, but has its roots in older variants. The farm in the phrase is a metaphor for a grave, the last plot of land a soldier will own.
The earliest variant is the phrase to buy it. From W. N. Glascock's Naval Sketch-Book in 1825:
Never mind, in closing with Crappo, if we didn't buy it with his raking broadsides. Crappo in this quotation is a slang word for the French, especially used in reference to French sailors.
This is still in use today. From Noble's With a Bristol Fighter Squadron, 1920, in reference to the WWI:

The wings and fuselage, with fifty-three bullet holes, caused us to realize on our return how near we had been to "buying it".​

WWI also saw nouns paired with the verb to buy. From Frasier & Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words of 1925:

Packet, a bullet wound, e.g. it would be said of a wounded man:–He "stopped a packet" or "bought a packet"–i.e., got hit by a bullet. Also, any trouble or unexpected bad luck.​

And Longstreet's Canvas Falcons of 1929 includes this reference to 1917 air combat:

"The major bought one," I said, climbing out, covered with my own slime.​

Partridge's Dictionary of Catchphrases records become a landowner as WWI slang meaning to die, the first use of the metaphor of acquiring land meaning death.
7 March 1954 sees the New York Times record in an article on Air Force slang:

Bought a plot: Had a fatal crash.​

The same year sees in Harvey's Jet:

Those jet jockeys just bought the shop, didn't they?​

Finally, in 1955 the form buy the farm is recorded. It first appears in print in an article in American Speech, along with a false explanation of its origin:

Buy the farm; buy a plot, v.phr. Crash fatally. (Jet pilots say that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer usually sues the government for damages done to his farm by the crash and the amount demanded is always more than enough to pay off the mortgage and then buy the farm outright. Since this type of crash [i.e., in a jet fighter] is nearly always fatal to the pilot, the pilot pays for the farm with his life.)​

From the earlier variants on the phrase, it is clear that the notion of the government buying land damaged in a crash is not the origin of the phrase. A variation on this myth is that the phrase is linked to a soldier's insurance, which would allow his family to pay off the mortgage on their farm if he died. Similarly, this is also false.
Buy the farm is only one of a long list of variants that dates back nearly two centuries.

 

[Sky Jet]

Balls to the wall is an aviation term, balls out is a much older term from trains ans most certainly does refer to the govenors on old steam engines.

Jet

 

[Rik717pilot]

The "whole nine yards" is older than aviation.. Icarus excepted. On a fully rigged ship from the early 16th century until the end of the sailing vessel navies, there are generally three masts, or vertical stems with three "yards" or horizontal timbers that hold the sails and are trimmed by heaving on the "sheets" and "belaying" or tying off of the lines on the rails with belaying pins. The term, as we apply it, is when all the yards have sails on them and the ship is going as fast as it can in the current wind condition or in other words, we are drinking or have drunk as much as we can and are sailing as fast as possible to a lee shore... or the rocks.. uh please excuse the play on words.

fr8doggie; love the picture of "Clutch Cargo". He was an inspirational character to me when he was on the "Garfiel Goose" show with Fraiser Thomas on WGN when I was about 7. How do I put a picture of something in the upper left corner of my data plate?

 

[Mamma]

"Howdy!" is a popular AF term when one adds to the fragrance of the flightdeck.

 

[NuGuy]

Lighter-than-Air

Word is that the Brits had two different types of airships, the type-A, which was a drigible (with a rigid frame), and the type-B which was non-rigid, or as they would say "limp" (gotta love the Brits for cool terms).

So the, inevitably, the term "type-B, limp" was shortened to "Blimp".

And as Paul Harvey would say "Now you know the REST of the story"

Nu

 

[PDH]

Cockpit

This is a rather strange choice to denote the pilot's compartment on an airplane, but once the semantic history of the word is known, all becomes clear.
Cockpit originally referred to a place for cock-fighting, literally a pit for fighting cocks. Thomas Churchyard writes in The Worthines of Wales (1587):

The Mountaynes stand . . . In roundnesse such as it a Cock pit were.​

Shakespeare used the word to refer to a theater and in the 17th century there was theater in London with that name. From Henry V (1599):

Can this Cock-Pit hold The vastie fields of France? Or may we cramme Within this Woodden O, the very Caskes That did affright the Ayre at Agincourt?​

In the 18th century, cockpit entered naval jargon, denoted the junior officer quarters on the lowest, or orlop, deck of a ship that doubled for the surgeon's hospital during battle. Presumably, this was because the midshipmen, like roosters, would get into fights with one another. From William Falconer's 1769 An Universal Dictionary of the Marine:

Cock-pit of a ship of war, the apartments of the surgeon and his mates, being the place where the wounded men are dressed.​

In 1914, the term was applied to airplanes; from the Reports and Memoranda of the Advisory Committee on Aeronautics:

There are several speed indicators . . . in which the pressure of the air in the cockpit is allowed to act on one side of the recording diagram.​

So the literal sense gave way to a naval metaphor, which was later applied to airplanes.
(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

When two females are flying it can be referred to as a box office rather than a cockpit.....otherwise it is called a flight deck.

 

[Dr. Rumack]

"Tits up"

I do not remember the airplane but it had a gyro, like many others, with two indentations on the bottom of the horizon line. If inverted (ie a/c on its back) they looked like a rack thus coining a machine not working or dead as being 'tits up'.

 

[Rik717pilot]

Which leads us to many other nautical themes:

Three sheets to the wind; is when after setting all nine yards, someone doesn't tie off the "sheets" or they go all a hughey and you are rapidly sailing towards the shoals... without any control on the sails or other propulsion means; oopps! Run the bugger aground.

Son of a gun; Many young boys from the ghettos of London were obscounded to the navy for the purpose of being powder monkeys and/or ships boys. Many at the tender age of 6 or so. When they were assigned to a "gun", they became the "son of a gun". Life expectancy was short.

Many more terms from nautica to come. We in aviation use a lot of nautical terms, expressions and calculations due to the trigonometrical functions of longitude and latitude that are constant between the the sea faring and aviating worlds.

 

[Huck]

Early transponders were called "parrots" - hence "squawk your parrot" became just squawking....

 

[Gorilla]

Since we are venturing into Nautica, Rik, have you heard this one?

"It's cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey."

What I've heard - There were racks made of brass that were called "monkeys" on a warship, and these racks had hollowed areas to hold round shot for the guns. In normal use, they worked fine, but in extreme cold, the brass contracted at a different rate than the iron shot, and the balls would be released to roll about.

"scuttlebutt" is the barrel of water available for deck hands to sip from during work, and of course gossip over.

 

[Dizel8]

"Buy the farm".

Supposedly the story is: With engines less than reliable, the early barnstormers often ended up landing in farming fields and were expected to
pay for damaged crops, hence one bought part of the farm. So, if you crashed and died, you bought the whole farm or just shortened to "the farm".

"The field is socked in": Apparently, in the early days of aviation, the french aviateurs would, in inclement weather such as a light mist, take down the cloth windsock and bring it indoors, hence the term "sock in", now known as "socked in".