Salty languages: the changing ways of cruise-speak

Cruise Travel, July-August, 2004 by Theodore W. Scull

The primary impetus for penning this essay came out of an article in Lloyd's List, the venerable British shipping publication, with its announcement that hereafter a ship would be considered a neutral "it" and no longer in the feminine as "she." That abrupt change of terminology has been argued at length in the press, shipboard smoking rooms, and at the family dinner table, but happily "it" has not taken general hold other than in that once stodgy--and now aiming to be with it--London broadsheet. Many publications appear sometimes not to know quite what gender to use, but happily, my editor at Cruise Travel remains fervently attached to "she," and "it" gets the blue pencil.

Across the Western Ocean, now commonly referred to as "the pond" by folks who have obviously never crossed the Atlantic by sea in December, the lovable French have "always considered a ship a "he"--le navire, le paquebot, le bateau. The ir beautiful country is the feminine La (Belle) France, but the last French Line liner was the manly Le France. The reason for this may be as obscure as why Americans drive on the right side of the road while our English-speaking forebears hug the left.

But the topic of ships as masculine, feminine, or neuter is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the present-day cruise industry's rampant desire to freeze out old maritime terminology and traditions while shipping-line executives cruise-speak about synergies and growing the company.

One of the first shipboard positions to go under, or be greatly diminished in power, is virtually a dodo word--dropped like a lead line over over the side in favor of hotel manager, The chief purser was once second only to The Old Man, also known as the captain, the four-striped fellow who drives the boat. So I guess it was a perfectly natural outcome that passengers on a passage to other parts would eventually become guests as they bobbed across the water in their floating hotel. But the word guest has the connotation of being a nonpaying, relatively short-term inhabitant at someone's home.

Then there is the word "soul," which when used nautically, very specifically refers to everyone aboard a ship--passengers, crew, even stowaways if present. Hence we can say in one word that 2,206 souls were aboard Titanic's maiden voyage rather than passengers officers, crew, and Jack Dawson.

The once-powerful steamship industry had the clout to develop a separate and highly specific vocabulary, quite distinct from land-based terms. And I am sure that old Cape Horners cringed a their briny sailing ship lingo got smartened up and modernized with the advances in steam propulsion and the coming of the luxurious trans-Atlantic liners.

Today's passengers--oops, guests--often haven't a clue about maritime lingo. And why should they? So they talk about going upstairs or downstairs to the next floor, now often named Biscayne or Dolphin, instead of ascending the companion or companionway to B Deck above or descending to D Deck below. But then one hears the curiously nautical--debarking by means of the gangplank (I do not think the U.S. Coast Guard would consider such a disembarkation all that safe).

When folks get into the spirit of their cruise, they become quizzical and trade statistics about how much the boat weighs. Most passenger ships are rated in gross tons, a volume measurement of enclosed space, a figure that has nothing to do with weight.

Boat vs. ship does not bother me much as it does some, ("Ships carry boats," harrumph many old salts), and I am not completely sure why. In the late 1950s and 1960s. I can recall my parents' friends asking what boat we were taking to Europe, or if we were flying or taking understatement in a very general way, and no one would have specifically referred to RMS Queen Mary as a boat. But when the Queen Mary landed her passengers at Southampton's Ocean Terminal, we boarded the boat train up to London.

Most cruise lines use double-occupancy figures for ship's carrying capacity, because most cabins are now doubles, and single cabins have nearly disappeared from toms (otherwise known as ships) such as the Caronia and QE2. Most cruise lines no longer book complete strangers into three- and four-berth cabins, whereas in the past, a steamship line sold many individual berths in multiple-berth cabins, and the ships capacity was therefore, the total berth capacity. Today, by using double-occupancy figures, one can easily exceed 100 percent of capacity when upper berths are occupied by families or friends sharing a cabin. It reads well for annual report to boast that the company's ships sailed at 105.5 percent of capacity. Bottom-liners love this, while the cruising public may wonder if the 5.5 percent had no place to rest their head during their cruise.

Now how scary is this? The Voyager of the Seas double-occupancy capacity is 3,114, and during her millennium cruise she carried 3,537 passengers, therefore operating at 114 percent of capacity. But with her total berth capacity of 3,838, she could actually reach being 123 percent full!