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Three sheets to the wind

Posted by Smokey Stover on October 10, 2009 at 20:24

In Reply to: Three sheets to the wind posted by Robert Gramcko on October 10, 2009 at 08:40:

: "Three sheets to the wind". From my experience, I doubt the accepted source is loose sheets and flapping sails. Under those conditions, the boat bobs in one spot. Moreover the sheets are down wind. However, when a sailboat is hoved to, the sheet are up wind and the boat can hobby horse around 30 to 90 degrees. Hoved to better fits the meaning of drunken motion.

Michael Quinoon, in World Wide Words, writes, "It's a sailor's expression, from the days of sailing ships. The terminology of sailing ships is excessively complicated and every time I refer to it people write in to say I've got it wrong, usually contradicting each other." Quinion then elucidates the term as best he can. He and the OED make it clear that a "sheet," in sailing terminology, is a rope or chain attached to the bottom corner of a sail. The first form of the expression (from not later than 1821) is "three sheets in the wind"; the modern version, "three sheets to the wind," probably reflects the mistaken notion that sheets are sails.

The expression seems to represent the condition of sailors who have been in port for a while, so we can assume that their ship is hove to. The expression has sometimes altered to "one sheet" to express a condition of half-drunk. Quinion speculates that three sheets in the wind is what might happen to a three-masted ship, since each bottom sail has only one sheet. See:

www.worldwidewords.org/ qa/qa-thr1.htm

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