Helm's Alee!
Tacking, Luffing, Jibing, Rigging... I speak the language of a sailor now.
Sailing, for me, is like venturing into a foreign country without even learning to say "Hello" in the native tongue. There is so much of sailboat vocabulary that often I give a blank stare and listen intently to understand what the hell the instructor is saying.
Among the many "something-new"s I poked my long nose into so far, sailing is really something "new". I am still amused at how the boat moves upwind. I hear an ice sailboat can go easily upto 60mph in a 20mph upwind.
Another field that I'd think would be really new (from a vocab angle) is ranching, as Anne Proulx's recent story in NewYorker fiction special issue - Tits-up in a ditch - richly illustrated. Take the title, for instance, if you can get past the mental brakes at the word Tit. It's a western slang to mean: to get stuck in a situation from which you can not get out of.
===
Oxymoron: In the early days of blogging, immediately after reading a nice story like "The Great Experiment," I would recognize the mentioning of Alex de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" and connect it with the first time I heard about it, and blog about it. But, in the days of anyone-can-google, I wouldn't.
Sailing, for me, is like venturing into a foreign country without even learning to say "Hello" in the native tongue. There is so much of sailboat vocabulary that often I give a blank stare and listen intently to understand what the hell the instructor is saying.
Among the many "something-new"s I poked my long nose into so far, sailing is really something "new". I am still amused at how the boat moves upwind. I hear an ice sailboat can go easily upto 60mph in a 20mph upwind.
Another field that I'd think would be really new (from a vocab angle) is ranching, as Anne Proulx's recent story in NewYorker fiction special issue - Tits-up in a ditch - richly illustrated. Take the title, for instance, if you can get past the mental brakes at the word Tit. It's a western slang to mean: to get stuck in a situation from which you can not get out of.
===
Oxymoron: In the early days of blogging, immediately after reading a nice story like "The Great Experiment," I would recognize the mentioning of Alex de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" and connect it with the first time I heard about it, and blog about it. But, in the days of anyone-can-google, I wouldn't.