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‘Sailing Close To The Wind’ And Other Phrases We Use When We Are Not Talking About Sailing At All
Ships and boats (and therefore wind and sails) are common in English because of our seafaring history — but do we really understand what these phrases originally meant?
5 min readOct 18, 2020
- Sailing too close to the wind
- With the wind in your sails
- A fair wind
- Taking the wind out of someone’s sails
- To face strong headwinds
- It’s an ill wind (that blows nobody any good)
Are these expressions that you hear, that you maybe use yourself? My story will explain where they came from and what they meant and you will see how they have been adopted for use away from their original context on water.
A bit of background.
You might not know it, but sail boats (and ships) do not, mainly, get blown along by the wind — that is, they do not need to have the wind behind them, to fill their sails.
In fact, the forward motion given to a vessel by a sail operates on the same principal as a wing giving lift to an aircraft.
