Trivia...Word and Phrase Origins

[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".