Euphemisms

“Three sheets to the wind”

Euphemisms

I heard this phrase the other day on the television program Dirty Sexy Money.

I knew what it meant — staggering drunk — but wasn’t sure about its origin, so I searched Google for “three sheets to the wind” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 70,500 matches.

According to one source, a “sheet” is a rope for securing a ship’s sail, not the sail itself. A “square-rigged” ship uses three ropes or sheets to tie a sail to the ship. If all three sheets are loose and therefore blowing in the wind, then the sail will be loose, causing the ship to go off course, just like a drunken sailor.

According to many articles, such as at World Wide Words, Pierce Egan in his 1821 work Real Life in London was the first to record the phrase “three sheets in the wind”.

This phrase has morphed since then to the much more popular “three sheets to the wind”.

“Nintendo is going to sell eleventy billion of them.”

Adjectives, Euphemisms, Outsider's Perspective

I saw this in an Ars Technica article published today about the Nintendo DSi.

I like the creativity of “eleventy billion”.

I searched for “eleventy” (with the quotation marks) on Google, and I got about 304,000 matches.

According to Wikipedia, the word “eleventy” was coined by linguist and author J. R. R. Tolkien and refers to the number 110.

I can imagine that some non-native speakers of English must be puzzled when they see this word, but it also makes sense when one compares it to the rhyming word “seventy”.

“Unchartered territory”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Euphemisms

I heard a Fox television sports commentator say this last evening during Super Bowl XLII.

Problem:
This phrase does not contain the correct adjective for the euphemism.

Explanation:
“Unchartered territory” would refer to territory that has not been chartered.

The definition of the adjective “chartered” is related to an arrangement of leased, exclusive, temporary transportation for a group of travelers.

Given that one charters transportation, not territory, “unchartered territory” makes no sense.

In contrast, given that one can map — or chart — territory, the correct adjective for the euphemism is “uncharted”. That is, “uncharted territory” is the euphemism that was mangled by the sports commentator.

For fun, I searched Google — with the quotation marks included in the search box — for “unchartered territory” and “uncharted territory” and got about 59,600 and 734,000 matches, respectively. That tells me that Web authors have written the euphemism correctly by a ratio of 12.3:1, which is good, but not excellent.

I believe that the spoken use of “unchartered” instead of “uncharted” in the euphemism is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis. It is simpler to pronounce the “ered” sound than to pronounce the “ed” sound.

Solution:
“Uncharted territory”