Two masts, square-rigged, fast – and the name transferred to the cell below decks, and only the cell survives
The Brig is the upstairs bar at Merchant House, charges sixty to seventy pounds a head, and has forty-seven reviews and a 4.4.
Forty-seven is a small sample and we will not build on it. But the word is a good one and it has done something strange.
The ship
A brig is a two-masted vessel, square-rigged on both masts, and it was one of the great workhorse ship types of the age of sail.
It was fast, it was manoeuvrable, it could be handled by a relatively small crew, and it was used for everything – merchant trade, coastal work, naval patrol, and piracy.
The word is a shortening of brigantine, which comes from the Italian for a skirmisher or a bandit – brigante – because the ships were used by exactly those people, and the name stuck to the hull.
The same root gives us brigand, and brigade.
And then it became a cell
In American naval usage, the brig is the ship’s prison.
The likeliest explanation is straightforward: brigs were sometimes used as prison ships, and the name transferred from the vessel to the function, and then from the function to any lock-up on any vessel at all.
So a word that means a fast, elegant, two-masted sailing ship now means, to a very large number of people, a small windowless room in which you are locked up.
The ship type is essentially extinct. The prison meaning is alive and in daily use.
The Prat’s linguistic desk has now watched this happen repeatedly across five hundred articles and would like to record the pattern: the beautiful meaning dies and the punitive one survives, and it is never the other way round.
Forge, coin, fabricate
Which we wrote about at Forge, ten articles ago.
To forge is to make and to fake. To fabricate is to build and to lie. To coin is to invent a phrase and to counterfeit a shilling.
English has an entire vocabulary of honest making, and every single one of those words has independently slid into meaning dishonest making – and not one has ever gone the other way.
The brig is the same movement in a different direction: from a thing that carries you across an ocean to a thing that stops you moving at all.
The bar
Sixty to seventy pounds is the most expensive band in this postcode, and it is a small upstairs room with a serious list, above a bar we have already praised.
Small room. Short list. Somebody who knows. Five hundred and three articles, and it has never once failed.
Verdict
Excellent, expensive, and hidden above something already good.
Go once. Order the rum, which is what a brig would have been carrying.
The rig, briefly
Square-rigged means the sails hang from horizontal yards across the ship, and it is superb for running before the wind and hopeless for sailing into it.
Fore-and-aft rigged means the sails run along the length of the hull, and it is the reverse: excellent at working upwind, less powerful with the wind behind.
A brig is square-rigged on both masts, which makes it fast on a following wind and hard work otherwise – and the entire history of the age of sail is a series of compromises between those two facts, argued over by men who would never have put it in those terms.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Mi terapeuta va a escuchar sobre esto. Se va a reconocer.