I've been looking at words and expressions that began at sea, so I'm going to have three expressions, very quickly, for you today that began at sea. The first is to "cut and run". If you cut and run, you make a swift exit, usually from a tricky situation. In the age of sail, however, it meant something very different and much more literal, because a captain's options were very limited if an enemy ship came up to it and it was at anchor. Obviously, he didn't have very much time to move, so if the situation was very, very urgent and staying put would lead to a loss of life, then the captain might deside it was safer and more prudent in fact just to cut the anchor cable and to leg it, living to fight another day, and that's exactly what cutting and run meant. It was the literal cutting of the anchor cable. So that's cut and run. Copper bottom, we talk about giving a "copper-bottomed assurance", a "copper-bottomed guarantee", which is cast-iron, if you like, to use another expression. And those two goes back not to sturdy saucepans, but to sea, and the use a copper to cover the bottom of wooden ships, and it was done specifically to protect ships from a really pesky mollusc that was called the teredo, or, in fact, is called the teredo, and it drills into wood. Copper also prevented shells and weeds accumulating on the bottom, which also hampered a boat's progress. But then it slipped into mainstream language, meaning something that was secure and sound because it had that copper bottom. And finally, to "up sticks", this was a bit of a surprise to me, that too goes back to a ship where the sticks in fact are either masts or the portion of a mast. A mast can often be unshipped, ie, removed from their regular or a fixed position when the ship's at anchor, but when you want to prepare the ship to set off, again, the mast, or masts, the sticks, in other words, must be upped. In other words they must be set up, and once that happens, the ship is ready to sail away.
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