THE UNCOMMON ORIGINS OF SOME COMMON EXPRESSIONS - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

In this series I will write the origins of some of the most common expressions of phrases that we use in ours day to day life. The facts given here are extracts from a book by the same name that I got long time back from Reader's Digest. I wholeheartedly thank the author 'John Kahn' for this amazing book of trivia

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Britain's history as a sea faring nation has left its mark on their language. Dozens of common English idioms have their source in shipboard life during the age of sail: In the same boat, at the helm, to run a tight ship, on the rocks, to keep things on an even keel, and so on.

Slightly less obvious are the phrases on the wrong tack (referring to an upwind course), to know the ropes (referring to the rigging on a sailing ship), and to give someone a wide berth (or to give him some leeway or to stay clear of him).

Sometimes the link with sailing has become fairly obscure. To describe someone as broad in the beam, for example, is to refer in fact to the beam of a ship - that is, its point of greatest width.

Hard and Fast, generally applied these days to a rule, was originally said of a ship that was stuck fast through being stranded. And touch and go probably originally mean coming near to being stranded - to scrape the keel in shallow water.

The phrase by and large too is nautical in origin - to sail by and large in a sailing ship was to sail at a slight angle to the wind. Perhaps because this was 'by and large' a safe and effective way of sailing in the direction of an oncoming wind, the phrase came to be used in this more general sense.

To sail close to the wind, by contrast, was a more risky business - it was to steer as near head-on as possible to the oncoming wind. Hence the general sense of the expression today: to take risks, or to verge on the irregular or illegal. The risk was that a slight shift in the wind might suddenly press the sails back against the mast, causing the ship to lose its stability and be taken aback, or taking the wind from its sails - two more nautical expressions that have passed into general use.

If everything is going well, you might say that all is plain sailing - originally plane sailing;that is, navigating by means of a simple plane chart, based on the assumption that the earth is flat or a plane. if things go badly, on the other hand, you might be on your beam ends - the beams were the diagonal struts across a ship, used to buttress the keel; so when a ship was on her beam ends, she was tilted over her side and in danger of capsizing.

Rather less reliably, the two phrases the devil to pay and between the devil and the deep blue sea have been traced back to the days of sail. When anticipating trouble, people sometimes say There's going to be the devil to pay. A longer version of the idiom, rarely heard nowadays, is The devil to pay and no pitch hot, suggesting lack of preparation for some important task. The devil here is a seam between planks on the side of a ship. And to pay such a seam is to seal it or smear it with tar. (The words pay and pitch, in these senses, are in fact related, both going back to the Latin word for tar, pix). If the sailors had neglected to prepare for caulking, then there was the devil to pay and no pitch hot. And if the captain or first mate found out about this inefficiency, there would be the devil to pay.

Betweeen the devil and the deep blue sea suggests a simple choice between two equally unwelcome options. Perhaps there is a more specific seafaring reference - to 'walking the plank' on a pirate ship. Dictionaries list, as one meaning of devil, a sharp-toothed or spiked tool. A captive walking the plank would have had the deep blue sea before him, and a pirate behind, prodding him with a marlinspike or devil.

It is possible, however, that the devil once again refers to the seam in the side of a wooden sailing ship. To caulk that seam, a sailor might be lowered by a rope from the deck - a precarious and dangerous position to be in, with little room for manoeuvre, suspended between the devil and the deep blue sea.