In the office mail today:

A review copy of the newly re-released "Ship to Shore"

What a fun book this is.

It has been around since 1993, but just updated and repressed.
The text is over 400 pages of common idioms from everyday speech that
originated at sea.

I think I'll toss in an excerpt once in a while when the NG seems to be more
off topic than usual. Hopefully this will add an additional dimension somewhere
between "Why does my outboard make a noise like chunka, chunka, ching," and
"George Bush and John Kerry are secretly gay lovers.".

Here's a good one:
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To flog a dead horse: To try to revive interest in a worn-out topic; to
resurrect a matter that has, by general consent, long since been
settled........

The dead horse is the term used by seamen to describe the period of work on
board ship for which they have been paid in advance when signing on- usually a
month's wages but sometimes two. There was a custom in merchant ships where the
seamen celebrated having "worked off the dead horse" (i.e. having completed
the duties covered by their pay advance) by parading a stuffed straw horse
around the decks, hanging it from the yardarm, and then heaving it overboard.

To flog a dead horse, then, is to expect- vainly- to get extra work out of a
ship's crew while they are still engaged in working off the "dead horse". Hence
the colloquial allusion to the lack of interest that is implicit in the phrase,
"Doesn't he know he's flogging a dead horse trying tointerest us in his
daylight saving scheme?"

The "Dead Horse" is said to be the only sea shanty composed and sung for
pleasure, all other shanties were sung to accompany various kinds of work.

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