It turns out that saying “pardon my French!” when we swear in English has more to do with class than I realised. 

“Spill the beans” comes from an ancient Greek voting style, and “stealing someone’s thunder” has a theatrical past ― even “goodbye” used to have holy connotations. 

And now, I’ve learned that “by and large” (meaning roughly, or on the whole) has unexpected origins too. 

According to Dictionary.com, the phrase has “nautical” origins and once meant “to the wind and off it”.

What?

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary explains that in old sailor’s slang, sailing directly into the wind was termed “by”, while going away from the direction of the breeze was called “large”.

“By” in that context was also used in the phrase “full and by,” which means sailing into the direction of the wind with all sails “full” (or up).

In his 1578 book, mathematician and Navy gunner William Bourne wrote that “to make a ship to draw or go but little into the water, and to hold a good wind, and to sail well both by and large, were very necessary”.

In other words, the phrase originally meant balancing the wind’s different effects on the ship to keep it steady.

Dictionary.com says the term had made its way onto dry land by the 1700s, at which point its definition had been broadened to mean “in one direction and another”.

That became “more or less,” or “on the whole,” over time. 

Are there any other sailing-based phrases?

Many! Royal Museums Greenwich says that “loose cannon” originally meant a cannonball that had become loose from the ropes securing it on a ship. 

That meant it could roll around, potentially harming sailors and generally acting unpredictably. 

We’ve also written before about how “chock-a-block” came from ships, too. 

A chock is a type of block that was originally used to hold ships in place ― they’re still placed under the tyres of inactive aeroplanes to stop them from rolling away. 

When sailors used to erect sails using complicated pulley systems (called block and tackle), there came a point when the ropes wouldn’t move any further. 

This reminded them of the braking effect of the “chock”, so “chock-a-block” became used to mean that stage of setting up sails on ship.

That phrase became conflated with Middle English’s chokkefull, meaning full to the brim.