Where did the expression “deep six” come from? I suspect it’s something obscene, or something related to air combat. Or both. Anyway, I’d like the SD.
There’s a New Order song which says “One of these days when you sit by yourself/ You’ll realize you can’t shaft without someone else”. So does “shaft” mean “copulate” in this context? Does that mean that “to give someone the shaft” means more or less the same thing as to “screw” them? I thought it was derived more from poking someone with a spear. So it’s an etymological question, I suppose.
Oh, I can’t remember the other expression I was gonna ask about. Pardons if these questions have been answered elsewhere on this site.
Well think of a clock’s face, and how the military sometimes uses the hours of the day to indicate direction (“Bandits at two o’clock!” etc.).
“Deep six” derives from this and means “way down” i.e. “all the way down”.
From The Dictionary of Cliches (Over 2,000 Entries!) by James Rogers, 1985
“Deep Six. In oblivion; discarded. The standard usage is ‘give him the deep six,’ probably in a macabre allusion to the practice of digging graves six feet deep or of burying people at sea in six fathoms of water.”
Oddly, the book didn’t have anything about the shaft. I always thought of it in conjunction with that old Jerry Reed song, “She got the gold mine, I got the shaft,” but that’s neither here nor there.
Uh, I dunno about that, but to show off, I do know that the board part of “room and board” refers to the fact that in medieval times, at mealtime they put a board on legs for a table, so board came to mean food.
Not to be picky or anything, but I think you are misunderstanding this air combat lingo a bit.
The numbers are on the clock. But the clock is on the horizontal. So 6 o’clock is behind you. Not below you.
“Look out Boris! He’s on your 6!”
This is a source of grave concern with planes that shoot forward.
__________________________PEACE
Just putting my 2sense in.
Tyranny,* like Hell*,* is not easily conquered*.
-Thomas Paine (fugitive slave catcher)
I actually have made that mistake before, 2sense, mainly from hearing the expression “12 o’clock high” too often without considering that 12 o’clock and high wouldn’t really be synonyms if one modified the other.
I got that misconception cleared up before my OP, though. I figured the “deep” meant below, and the “six” meant left behind, as in “I shot up that mother Fokker and left him smoking behind me in a spiral dive.”
By the way, the reason I thought it was obscene was, Cecil used it jokingly in the post about “Squaw as an obscene insult?” He said something like “So and so deep-sixed that idea … ooops, maybe that’s not a polite word to use here.” So I was very confused.
Deep six is listed in the OED under six, as chiefly American, beginning in 1929 with a book called * Underworld Slang * (which I suppose is a dictionary) that simply says “deep six, a grave.” The use as a verb, meaning to abandon, or dispose of begins in 1948, with a sailor’s reference, and continues until popularization by John Dean in his description of what Mr. Erlichman did with certain records during the Watergate hearing.
Tris
Imagine my signature begins five spaces to the right of center.
That sounds more reasonable then what I expected. I always thought it was “shock” or maybe “shop”. New Order is one of my favorite groups, but they don’t have especially deep lyrics.
And you misunderstand the concept (well most concepts, but in this case, one at the moment) of Three Dimensions. Harken ye back (forward in your case, no doubt) to 6th Grade Math and remember the X, Y, and Z axes of the Cartesian Coordinate System.
Now, consider the center of the clock as being at 0,0,0 coordinates.
From there, you can indicate directions or vectors with the numbers of the clock, for example, on one plane (geometrical, not aviation) the vector can indicate 12 O’clock as showing that the object in question is directly in front of the observer in the aircraft.
Now consider that an object may be directly beneath the aircraft and thus is at 6 O’clock in that plane (again, geometrical).
Thus, for indicating directions in the two geometric planes, vectoring with the clock system is quite useful.