![]() Have you got a Big Question you'd like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at. The next time someone asks you what the scuttlebutt is, now you can tell them. Nautical technology made the scuttlebutt obsolete, but the term endured, becoming a catch-all word for unfounded rumors. The scuttlebutt was really the only place to do it. Since sailors could congregate around the fountain, it became a place to finally catch up and exchange gossip, making scuttlebutt synonymous with casual conversation. A scuttlebutt was therefore a hatch in the cask.īecause sailors usually received orders from shouting supervisors, talking amongst themselves was discouraged. The cask was known as a butt, while scuttle was taken from the French word escoutilles and means hatch or hole. It was later used as the name of the drinking fountain found on a ship or in a Naval installation. But what exactly is scuttlebutt, and why did it become associated with idle water cooler talk?Īccording to Merriam-Webster, a scuttlebutt referred to a cask on sailing ships in the 1800s that contained drinking water for those on board. We can easily infer that scuttlebutt is a slang term for information or maybe even gossip. “What’s the scuttlebutt?” you’d say, for example, and then they’d reply with the solicited scuttlebutt. Sometimes, you can ask them what the scuttlebutt is. Refine the search results by specifying the number of letters. You can easily improve your search by specifying the number of letters in the answer. Below are all possible answers to this clue ordered by its rank. We found 17 possible solutions for this clue. You might ask someone how they’re doing, what’s new, or if they’ve done anything interesting recently. with 6 letters was last seen on the October 02, 2022. Neglecting it will only lead to greater issues down the road.Casual conversation is home to a variety of prompts. scuttlebutt: 1 n a report (often malicious) about the behavior of other people Synonyms: comment, gossip Types: show 5 types. The poop deck is the highest deck of the ship, typically at the stern.Īll of this is to say that regardless of what scuttlebutt actually means, if your dog is scooting its bottom across your floors, you should look into an ointment or cream for that. Poop comes from the Latin, puppis meaning ‘ship’, particularly the back or ‘stern’. It’s the sailor’s equivalent to water cooler talk.īy the way, poop deck has nothing to do with human waste. And that’s where it took on its euphemistic meaning. The scuttlebutt was typically placed at the poop deck of the ship for general use by crew members to gather and gossip around. When you put scuttle and butt together you end up with ‘a hatched cask used for holding drinking water’. ![]() This use of the term butt comes from the Latin buttis-which is also where we get the word bottle.īy the way, have you ever wondered why butchers call the shoulder of a pig the Boston butt? Its because pork shoulders in America were often shipped around the country from New England butchers. If we use the term a bit more loosely, it could just mean ‘cask’ or ‘container’. It equals 4 barrels, 2 hogsheads or 126 gallons 3. So two buttocks make up one butt.īut more importantly to the term at hand, butt is also an old unit of measurement for wine casks. The suffix -ock is an Old Saxon way of making words diminutive-similar to how a hillock is a ‘small hill’ or bullock is a ‘young or castrated bull’. By the way, some people think butt is short for buttocks, but that’s not exactly correct. How do you know if you’re talking about a hatchway or a scuttle? Well, “hatches of a smaller kind are distinguished by the name of scuttles” 2.Īnd on a ship, butt has the same general meaning of ‘end’ we all use it for-whether it be the wider ‘end’ of plank of wood, the fat ‘end’ of a rifle or the plump ‘end’ of a human. ![]() Scuttle may refer to anything from a porthole on the side of a ship to sometimes even a doorway. And on a ship, the term scuttle refers to a “small hole or port cut either in the deck or side of a ship” 1. Scuttle comes from the Old French escoutille meaning ‘hatchway’. But how did such a silly word come to mean telling tales out of school? Well, that’s an interesting story… A Sailor’s Butt Scuttlebutt is an old-timey word for ‘gossip’-or a synonym for ‘ factoid‘. But actually scuttlebutt has nothing to do with itchy bums scooting across your grandmother’s shag. Yeah, it sounds like that thing your dog keeps doing on the nice carpet whenever you have company over.
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