Gundeck (pronounced guhn-dek)
(1) Historically,
on warships of the sail era, any deck (other than the weather deck) having
cannons in permanent place from end to end.
(2) As
gundecking, navy slang for falsifying records (now used also in merchant and
other commercial shipping) and a synonym of “pencil whip” (to falsify records
to convey the impression tasks have been completed).
1670–1680:
The construct was gun + deck. Gun (in this context) was from the mid-fourteenth
century Middle English gunne & gonne (an engine of war that throws
rocks, arrows or other missiles from a tube by the force of explosive powder or
other substance), from the “Lady Gunilda”,
a very big crossbow with a powerful shot, the second element of the term from
the Old Norse. Originally restricted to
the largest of projectile-launchers, “gun” was later applied to all firearms,
pistols beginning to be described thus from circa 1745 although the military
resisted the spread, preferring to restrict “gun” to mounted cannons,
especially the big, long-barrelled (almost always big-bore) devices used with high
velocity and long trajectory shells. Hence
the phrase “great guns” (used by both the army & navy) which were distinguished
from small arms (muskets, pistols, rifles) and most western militaries still
insist pistols are “side arms” rather than guns. The idiomatic uses seem all to be modern: The
use to describe a “thief or rascal: dates from 1858, the phrase “jumping the
gun” was US English from 1812 which referenced a sporting competitor anticipating
the starter’s pistol and “guns” to mean “a woman’s breasts” is said to be from
as recently as 2006, the coining presumably because it was felt there weren’t a
sufficient number of slang terms to use in anatomical tribute. The origin of “son of a gun” is contested. One theory suggests it dates from the
eighteenth century when women sometimes accompanied sailors on long voyages,
giving (as seems inevitable) birth on board, the most convenient place being
the space between the cannons on the gundeck.
Such a child would therefore be called a “son of a gun” although this
doesn’t account for the girls, the explanation for that perhaps as simple as “daughter
of a gun” not so effortlessly rolling of the tongue. There is no documentary evidence to support
this and most etymologists appear to suggest the phrase was merely a euphemism
for the vulgar “son of a bitch”. Best of
all however was the US Civil War (1861-1865) era story which in which “son of a
gun” was used to explain a young lady’s otherwise inexplicable pregnancy by
claiming a fired musket ball had passed through a man’s testicle before lodging
in her ovaries. There has never been any
medical support for the theory but it’s not impossible the explanation was
accepted (if not actually believed), south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The construct
of the name Gunnhildr (of which there
are many variations) was the Old Norse gunnr
(battle, war), from the primitive Indo-European gwhen- (to strike, kill) + hildr
(battle), which technically creates a pleonasm but the duplication may be
related to the wish to emphasise the size of the weapon. The linguistic technique is noted in other
languages such as that of the Darkinjung people (the original inhabitants of a
part of costal New South Wales (NSW), Australia) in which the word for “water,
pond etc” was woy and their name for
a large body of water was woy woy
(which endures as the name of the town Woy Woy, situated next to a deep tidal
channel). In a military context, the woman's
name meant “battle maid”, some of the variations (Hilda, Gunilda, Gunhild, Gunhilda, Gunnhildr et al) familiar from
Wagnerian interpretations. Another Middle
English adaptation of the women’s name Gunilda was gonnilde (cannon) and it appears also in a military stocktake (written
in Anglo-Latin), a munitions inventory of Windsor Castle dating from 1330: “...
una magna balista de cornu quae Domina Gunilda ...” In the usual military manner, ancillary pieces
picked up names associated with their primary device, hence the early
fourteenth century gonnilde gnoste (spark
or flame used to fire a cannon).
Something which might provide some insight into the (male) military mind
is the frequency with which women’s names were used of the most extraordinarily
powerful artillery pieces (Mons Meg, Big Bertha, Brown Bess et al). The other influence on the development of the
word may have been the Old French engon,
a dialectal variant of engin (engine),
the word engine’s original meaning better understood as something like “machine”
or “constructed device”.
Deck (in
this context) was from the mid-fifteenth century Middle English dekke (covering extending from side to
side over part of a ship), from a nautical use of the Middle Dutch dec & decke (roof, covering), from the Middle Dutch decken, from the Old Dutch thecken,
from the Proto-West Germanic þakkjan,
from the Proto-Germanic þakjaną and
related to the German Decke (covering,
blanket) and the Proto-Germanic thakam
(source also of the noun thatch), from the primitive Indo-European root steg & teg- (to cover). It was thus a doublet of thatch and thack. In English, the sense was soon extended by
the Admiralty from “covering” to “platform of a ship” and the apparently
mysterious use from the 1590s meaning “the pack of playing cards necessary to
play a game” may have been an allusion to the cards being stacked like the
decks of a big ship. In audio
engineering, the tape deck was first documented in 1949, apparently a reference
to the flat surface of the old reel-to-reel tape recorders. Dating from 1844, the deck chair gained its
name from their well-publicized use on ocean liners. The phrase “on deck” was an old admiralty term
(famously “all hands on deck”) meaning “ready for action or duty” and by the 1740s
it had entered general (non-nautical) use, in the US by 1867 entering the
lexicon of baseball in the sense of “a batter waiting a turn at the plate” The phrase “clear the desks” is now used in
many contexts (and a favourite in corporate jargon) but originally was an
instruction during a sea-battle to remove from the deck of a ship the wreckage
of the engagement (downs masts, sails & spars, the dead and injured etc) which
might interfere with a renewal of action.
Perhaps surprisingly, it’s documented only since 1852 but was likely to
have been in use at sea for generations and it may be a variation of the French
débarasser le pont. (clear the
bridge).
Ships
of the line
Over time, warships evolved from two or three
masted galleons into big, multi-decked affairs, the largest of which (those which
would evolve into the dreadnoughts and the successor battleships of the
twentieth century) were known as “ships of the line” which would form the
backbone of the Western world’s great navies between the seventeen and
nineteenth centuries before they gave way to the steam-power. The idea of the “ship of the line” and the
gundeck were intertwined because naval combat evolved into a fighting formation
called the “line of battle” in which the opposing fleets manoeuvred to form lines
so the guns could be fired in broadside (a simultaneous discharge of all the
guns arrayed on one side of a ship).
Physics dictated the advantage in battle lay with the biggest ships with
the biggest guns, thus the appearance of ships of the line with two, three or
even four gundecks. Of course, as decks
with heavy guns were added, the centre of gravity rose and the need to find the
optimal compromise balancing speed, stability and firepower preoccupied naval
architects.
By
the turn of the eighteenth century, the definitive shape of a ship of the line
had emerged. The galleons protruding aft
superstructure had been abandoned and they could displace as much as 2000 tons
and be 200 feet (60 m) in length with crews of 500-800 sailors. The cannons were arrayed along the
(typically) three gundecks, the 30-odd heaviest guns (32-48 lb) on the lower
gundeck, a similar number of 20-24 pounders in the middle with 24-30 12
pounders on the upper, the allocation reflecting the naval architects’ concerns with weight distribution. The Royal Navy, rated it ships of the line
according to firepower, the categories being third rate (up to 70 guns), second
rate (70-100 guns) & first rate (over 100 guns) but the admirals were also
realists, Lord Nelson (1758-1805) reckoning that on shore, a 12-gun fort could
hold its own against a 100 gun ship of the line, a lesson which had apparently
been forgotten when in 1915 some pre-dreadnoughts were sent to bombard the fortifications
on the Gallipoli Peninsular when an unsuccessful attempt was made to force the
straits of the Dardanelles and take Constantinople.
Gundecking
The
term “gundecking” was naval slang for the falsification of records (and a synonym
of “pencil whip”). The origin of the tem
is speculative but the most plausible explanation is said to relate to midshipmen
(the lowest rung of the navy’s commissioned ranks) on the gundeck performing
their celestial navigation tasks which (three time a day), were used to
determine a ship's position using the morning star sights, the noon sun line,
and the evening star sights. However,
not all midshipmen were as diligent as their captain would have hoped and
rather than completing the dreary business of computing from fresh observations,
simply reckoned the position on the basis of the speed and direction earlier recorded
by their more contentious shipmates. In
other words, they made an educated guess and wrote down what they thought the
numbers should be. The term gundecking is
now used to indicate the falsification of documentation in order to avoid doing
the work required and in commercial shipping, the word is heard in cases which
come before the courts. There are
stringent regulations which restrict how ships may process their bilge water (a
truly disgusting mix of oil, water and sewerage) and on cruise ships with
thousands of passengers there’s a lot of it and it’s an expensive business,
ships’ engineers required to maintain hourly records of the purification
processes prior to discharge into the open sea.
Because it costs a fraction as much to falsify the records and simply
discharge the untreated bilge, some are tempted to “gundeck” the books and just
open the valves on what is known as a “magic pipe” which is a straight line
from bilge to ocean. Fines in the order
or US$40 million have been imposed so the costs of gundecking can be high.
In 2015, a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles found Lindsay Lohan had been doing a bit of gundecking in recording as “community service” the hours spent working with the charity group Community Service Volunteers (CSV) during the time she was in London appearing in a West End production of David Mamet's (b 1947) Speed-the-Plow (1988). Some of the hours claimed were absorbed lobbying the US insurance company Esurance to donate US$10,000 (£6,440) to the CSV although a statement issued by CSV confirmed Ms Lohan had volunteered on the organisation's “Positive Futures” project, which works with teenagers in Hackney, adding “She has built strong relationships with the young volunteers she has worked with on the scheme.” The community service order dates from traffic offences in 2012 and the judge found some of her activities in London, including “meeting & greeting” fans didn’t qualify as “community service” and ordered the gundecked hours be annulled with a further 125 hours to be performed.
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