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Chris -- 2018-04-11
‘By and large’ is nautical in origin, from the times when ships sailed large, with the wind behind them, or by, into the wind. Nowadays it would mean something like ‘generally’ or ‘on the whole’.
Buying large suggests taking in a larger sample in order to gain accuracy, the opposite perhaps of a lucky dip.
... sometimes it’s too expensive, sometimes it’s geography specific only but buying large, there is something that’s available out there.
Strange”, but buying large it’s just accepted that the MCU’s super-heroes now have to deal with the fact that they are in fact, super-heroes.
But I’ll put my two cents in here and there, but buying large I kind of stayed out of it.
Windows do use a bit of open source code sometimes, but buying large it is definitely proprietary.
For several years I had a colleague with a whirring rhotic West Country accent too extreme even for a pantomime pirate. He was an ex-Devonport shipwright and there was scarcely any English expression he didn’t claim to have a nautical origin, apart from a few from Shakespeare which he reluctantly allowed. Come to think of it though, many of WS’s are soaked in the sea too.
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Wow, I didn’t know that etymology. What was Bill (S)’s contact with the sea? He didn’t indulge in foreign ventures, like his contemporary Donne done did, did he?
(btw, buying large has a couple of other mentions )
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-07-11 20:01:00)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Oops, duh, and dash-my-buttons! In already and I failed to spot them.
He didn’t indulge in foreign ventures, like his contemporary Donne did, did he?
It has been suggested that WS’s “missing years” were spent afloat. There are books by A F Falconer called ‘Shakespeare and the Sea’ and ‘A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sea and Naval Terms Including Gunnery’.
Old Salt Blog writes:
Falconer wrote “It must be stressed, that Shakespeare’s knowledge of seamanship, navigation and the navy is different in kind and in degree from his acquaintance with law, medicine, music and other arts, which is of a general sort and not beyond the reach of one who is highly intelligent and versatile. But here it is professional. He is drawing on a whole body of unified knowledge in the manner of one who understands it from within.”
In addition to being a respected scholar, A.F. Falconer had also served as a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy during World War II. Sir Eric Anderson, former headmaster and provost of Eton, who had been a student of Falconer’s wrote to Spencer, “Again and again during the night watches, Falconer found the words of Shakespeare ringing in his head and began to realise that he had really known what goes on at sea. The accuracy of each reference to the sea and seamanship, and the use of sea imagery in plays that have nothing to do with the sea, convinced him that some part of Shakespeare’s missing years must have been spent as a sailor.”
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