You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Here in sunny San Diego, I've been spending time lately with sailing enthusiasts.

And of course, for me, half the fun is just listening to their language.

For the longest time they were saying Latlong and I didn't know what they were talking about.

Latitude and longitude?

Yes, yes, what's the Latlong?

And then I learned the word decastling, which has to do with when you're pulling the chain on an anchor.

The chain can tend to castle, you know, it can tend to sort of pile up.

So you have to decassal the chain.

Isn't that cool? The little mounds of chains.

I can picture that.

Yeah. And then another word was catenary curve which just made me fan

myself because catenary comes from a Latin word catena which means chain like

Kavina in Spanish and

concatenation which is a chain of events and the catenary curve is what you

want your anchor chain to look like you don't want it pulled tight you want

kind of a curve to it. So I was just thrilled to be having all these

conversations with language that I wasn't familiar with at all. These folks

were planning to sail along the Baja California Peninsula and what I learned is if you're

going south from San Diego it's relatively easy and that's called the Baja

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