February 2012
Every human endeavor, whether blacksmithing, computer science, boating or aviation, has its unique nomenclature. The anthropologists will tell you—with a nervous glance at the higher apes and aquatic mammals—that it is the invention and use of words that defines us as human.
Disagreeing over the use of words, where they come from and how we use them, is also essentially human and has enlivened many a hangar flying session over the years. Just bring up “deduced,” abbreviated as “ded.,” versus “dead reckoning” in any group of pilots who learned to fly before the advent of GPS and you’ll see what I mean.
In addition to the use of words, it may be the collecting and use of stuff that defines us as Homo sapiens. I am moved to these thoughts upon having recently become the proud owner of a maritime conveyance named by its manufacturer back in 1974 as a Laguna Windrose 24.
She is not an aircraft, but a trailerable sailboat, sloop-rigged, with a retractable keel, which makes her of shoal draft, meaning with said board winched up into its trunk or well, she can travel in shallow waters. Her single mast can be folded on deck to facilitate the aforementioned trailering. I have owned sailboats before, even lived aboard my first wooden sloop in Sausalito in a pre-wife-and-children era, but never messed about with trailerable sailboats before, so these variations are a mystery.
Over the winter holidays we were joined by our three children, and by my wife Dorrie’s parents. Her father, who is nearing 90, (known familiarly as “Grandfather,” as my dad is “Grandpa”) is a blue-water sailor who has owned many sailboats since his first as a boy on Lake Coeur d’Alene in the 1930s. One morning after Christmas he offered to come “down to your shop and help you sort out your rigging.”
Loath to pass up such an offer, off we all went for a pleasant and useful sunny afternoon that helped me to begin to remember the maritime jargon that had seeped out of my brain over my boatless years. The names all came back as Grandfather peered through his thick, black-rimmed glasses at the mast set up on sawhorses, his white hair shining in the sun, his wiry hands alive among the steel cables and Dacron lines, sorting the standing and running rigging wrapped around the mast by the previous owner.
He intoned the words for upper and lower shrouds, of port and starboard variety; then backstay, forestay, main and foresail halyards, boom vang, and wondered where the topping lift had gotten itself off to. The “crew” helped by making lists of parts that needed to be replaced or refit. I heard myself say, “Don’t forget the rudder pintles and gudgeons need to be looked at,” and wandered off into a reverie about the words shared among sailors and aviators. Maybe it was the word rudder that set me off.
The very word we aviators call ourselves—pilot—is used at sea to mean steer, the verb form; and as a noun as the expert brought aboard to guide a ship through a difficult passage or into port or harbor.
A glance at the terminology section of that bible of maritime lore, Chapman’s Piloting, Seamanship and Small Boat Handling, reveals a list of words that will be familiar to any aviator (ahem, pilot) long ago borrowed from our maritime antecedents: “abeam,” as in “abeam the runway numbers”; “chocks,” as in “pull them or you’re not going anywhere”; “downwind,” that leg in the landing pattern parallel to the runway; to say nothing of “knots,” “pitch,” “yaw,” “roll” and even “propeller.”
A few days after Grandfather helped with the rigging, I had lunch with my friend Joe, who was a naval aviator and is now a writer as well as a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. It was over the salad that the maritime–aviation link resurfaced when he spoke about enjoying his students’ reactions when he writes “ded reckoning,” not “dead reckoning,” on the chalkboard, and proceeds to explain it is not misspelled.
Ah, I thought, another nautical term also used in aviation, as well as the basis for long-standing disagreement among both salty mariners and dauntless aviators. There was no helping myself. When I returned home, my exploration of “ded” versus “dead” began.
Glance up a few lines in the preceding paragraph to the name of that university where Joe teaches aviation. Inside that word “aeronautical” in its name is the word “nautical,” even though at Embry-Riddle, where you can study aviation or space science and there are no dinghies to be found, you might be able to study soaring in a—wait for it—sailplane… but not travel the briny sea, as far as I can tell.
Finding Your Way
Dead (not “ded,” sorry, Joe) reckoning, as older pilots and sailors know, is the process of estimating an aircraft or ship’s position based on its speed and direction of travel since its last known position. As many of us remember if we had the right sort of flight instructor, all that is needed to figure out approximately where you are is an airspeed indicator (or aboard ship, a knot meter or log), an accurate timepiece and a compass.
The other pre-GPS and radio navigation methods for finding your way are pilotage, which is navigation by visible landmarks; and celestial navigation, which uses stars or planets to steer by.
The phrase in question, dead reckoning, apparently first surfaced in the 1600s. My friend Joe and others opine that dead reckoning once was called deduced reckoning, which was shortened in an almost mythical ship’s log to ded. reckoning. A later reader of the log thought “ded” was “dead” misspelled. A second theory has it that it was “dead” from the beginning, but since it has nothing to do with death, someone decided that it was derived from “deduced.”
Check your own dictionaries and you’ll find remarks ranging from the possibility and plausibility of the abbreviated-deduced derivation to the esteemed Oxford Dictionary saying flat-out that idea is bogus.
Another lexicographical theory holds that the “dead” comes from usage such as “dead ahead,” or “dead in the water.” This concept makes sense to me, as an estimated position in dead reckoning relies on an actual know position or fix to base it all on, such as one fixed or dead in the water with no movements caused by tides, currents or leeway.
Differences of opinion abound. According to a brilliant article on the subject from the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board (SDSAB), the Norton Encyclopedic Dictionary of Navigation likes the derivation from the adjective “dead” as in “dead in the water.” In an FAA pamphlet called Dead Reckoning Navigation, esteemed aviation writer Barry Schiff wrote “according to popular definition, dead reckoning is short for ‘deduced reckoning’ or, as the old-timers used to say, ‘you’re dead if you don’t reckon right.’ In truth, however, the term originated with maritime navigation and refers to “reckoning or reasoning (one’s position) relative to something stationary or dead in the water.”
It all becomes even more interesting when SDSAB informed me that the 1958 and some later editions of Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator says both theories are correct, bringing up the idea that in olden days the word “dead” was once actually spelled “ded.” But then it quashes that concept by saying that the earliest extant entries of the “ded.” theory are from just before World War II, and even referring to Charles Lindbergh’s use of the “dead” spelling in his two books written in 1927 and 1953.
Straight Dope, which has become my resource of choice for such discussions (www.straightdope.com) wraps it up, nails it down and fixes it dead to rights by pointing out that both the FAA and the U.S. Coast Guard spell the navigation process we all know and love using the word dead.
In the end, maybe such discussions are akin to spot-landing and flour-bombing competitions common in grassroots aviation, in that it may not really matter if we hit the target or are the pilots who land closest to the line. (“Grassroots aviation”—now there’s an aeronautical phrase crying out for an etymological exploration, hmmm?)
What does matter is that such behavior makes us happy, whether we are throwing bags of flour out the cockpit window or practicing precision landings while piloting an aeronautical device—or in this particular case, talking about words that help us imagine the sky into existence from marks on a printed page.
David Hipschman is a pilot and aircraft owner. He writes the Heading Bug column here, edits the National Association of Flight Instructors’ Mentor magazine, and teaches journalism at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Fla. Send questions or comments to editor@www.piperflyer.com.
