Ship Shape

[00:00] You just like saying magma, though.
[00:01] I'm good at math.
[00:02] Oh, should we do an under Googles?
[00:11] That was the play of Super Excited.
[00:14] I told us we had to, sir.
[00:17] You said we signed up for it.
[00:21] In the end, it's going to be better and more true
[00:23] than Google can give you.
[00:26] Also, you've got an under-Google-ble for us this week?
[00:29] I do.
[00:30] You know, we love doing idioms here
[00:32] that we're not really sure where they come from.
[00:34] And Jason was not feeling great this week.
[00:39] Had a little cold or something, and so I
[00:42] was thinking about the phrase under the weather.
[00:46] And I don't know why we call being sick under the weather.
[00:52] Does anybody have any thoughts on that?
[00:56] Hmm.
[00:57] Hmm.
[01:00] I don't really know.
[01:03] Yeah, again, this is one of those things
[01:04] that you just take for granted and don't really
[01:07] think about, I guess.
[01:09] I mean, I guess either you can think of it
[01:12] as it's under the influence of the weather.
[01:16] So it's like it's cold and rainy, and it made shit sick.
[01:20] Exactly, yeah.
[01:22] That's what I was thinking.
[01:23] Or weather is like a normal sunny day,
[01:28] and you're underneath that.
[01:29] You're below par.
[01:30] You're below par.
[01:32] Maybe.
[01:36] Jill, what do you think?
[01:38] Well, I was thinking maybe the weather could just
[01:40] be a representation of just the sickness.
[01:45] You're just under the influence of the weather could just
[01:49] be another name for something not good or disruptive.
[01:55] And you're under that, under the influence right there.
[02:00] Under the influence is a different thing, I think.
[02:02] Well, they can be together.
[02:05] You know, sometimes they overlap.
[02:09] You can get a DWW, a driving wall, weathered.
[02:15] That's how it used to be.
[02:17] What do you wear on it?
[02:18] It's a horse and buggy thing, man.
[02:21] Oh, sure.
[02:22] Yeah, so what do we think this came about?
[02:25] Yeah, where is this coming from?
[02:26] Yeah, yeah, I like that.
[02:27] Shakespeare?
[02:27] We're assuming Shakespeare, right?
[02:30] Either that or falconry.
[02:32] Pliny the Elder.
[02:35] I'm thinking 1840s.
[02:40] London.
[02:42] OK, it's always cloudy and rainy there.
[02:45] Right.
[02:46] We're Seattle.
[02:48] We're Seattle.
[02:50] No, I assume that, yeah, this has been,
[02:53] when did they invent weather?
[02:54] Because I think it probably came right after that.
[02:57] Was weather a discovery or an invention?
[03:02] I think we discovered weather.
[03:04] Yeah.
[03:06] So before there was weather, it was just?
[03:10] Under the sky.
[03:10] Things happening?
[03:11] Like, you didn't like.
[03:14] I mean, there had to be a term for the current conditions
[03:18] outside, right?
[03:19] So when did we come up with the term weather?
[03:21] That's the, maybe that's when we came up with under the water.
[03:25] Now we're expanding on it.
[03:28] That's probably too much.
[03:29] I think we're outside the scope of work on this.
[03:33] Yeah.
[03:34] OK, so you're not feeling well.
[03:36] You're under the weather.
[03:39] And it came from England.
[03:42] And you're going with the 1840s?
[03:44] Is that where you're going, Joey?
[03:45] Right, yeah.
[03:46] I'm going earlier.
[03:48] I think we used the term weather earlier than that.
[03:50] Well, I think the term weather is older than that,
[03:52] but under the weather, which is the focus of this
[03:55] under Googlebot.
[03:56] OK, fair enough.
[03:58] If nothing else, we're laser focused.
[04:04] OK, started Googling.
[04:06] OK.
[04:07] The phrase is possibly has nautical or seafaring origins.
[04:12] Ooh, that makes sense.
[04:15] So for instance, the phrase finder
[04:19] mentions that in old days when a sailor was feeling seasick,
[04:23] he was sent down below to help his recovery under the deck
[04:27] and away from the weather.
[04:28] Oh, that makes total sense.
[04:31] Yeah, so it has to do with the under the weather bow.
[04:36] The term is correctly under the weather bow,
[04:39] which is a gloomy prospect.
[04:41] The weather bow bow is the side upon which all rotten weather
[04:47] is blowing.
[04:49] So is it bow?
[04:51] Yeah, I think a bow.
[04:52] Under the weather bow.
[04:53] So yeah, so I like this.
[04:54] So you're feeling seasick because of the bad weather.
[04:59] And they said you below deck.
[05:04] That's pretty straightforward.
[05:06] I think multiple sources are confirming this.
[05:12] The opposite would be ship shape, which means everything
[05:16] is going to be good, including your health.
[05:18] Oh.
[05:20] OK, here we go.
[05:21] Nice.
[05:22] Learning stuff.
[05:23] So it was straightforward, but not that straightforward.
[05:26] I guess we should have.
[05:28] We always go to falconry and sometimes miss the fact
[05:31] that things can be nautical terms.
[05:34] Well, I think all of us are pretty well-known landlubbers,
[05:39] so we're just not looking outside the coastlines
[05:44] for our answers.
[05:47] And so weather comes from the old English weather,
[05:52] which meant air, sky, breeze, storm, or tempest,
[05:57] from the proto-Germanic wedrum, which meant wind.
[06:03] Nice.
[06:05] That makes sense.
[06:07] Wind is kind of the first effect of what you feel of weather,
[06:11] right, on some level?
[06:14] Because if there's no wind, you don't really call it weather,
[06:17] unless it's raining or snowing.
[06:22] The Greeks had words for good weather
[06:25] and words for storm and winter.
[06:27] But no generic word for weather.
[06:30] May have been their downfall.
[06:32] Until chyros began to be used as such in Byzantine times.
[06:41] OK.
[06:43] Yeah, and then Latin tempestus, which means weather,
[06:48] from which the term tempest comes from, also originally
[06:52] meant time, but meant weather in Latin as well.
[06:58] So it really is about the here and now.
[07:01] What's happening?
[07:03] It's happening right now.
[07:06] So it definitely gets back to Shakespeare then, somehow.
[07:11] Sure, yeah.
[07:12] I mean, the tempest.
[07:13] The tempest, right.
[07:14] Exactly.
[07:15] It always comes back to Shakespeare.
[07:17] It comes full circle.
[07:19] And plenty of the elder was in there, too.
[07:25] Well, I'm glad you're feeling less under the weather.
[07:27] I'm glad you're feeling ship-shaped, Jason.
[07:29] Thanks.
[07:29] I am.
[07:30] Indeed.