There ‘she’ goes—is it a boat or a farm implement?

While waiting at the feed mill to buy a bale of straw bedding for the 105-pound retriever that our daughter was kind enough to leave with us for permanent boarding when she left for college and career almost a dog-lifetime ago, I listened in on the farmer talk going on around a table in the corner. One of the agricultural raconteurs who gather there on Saturday mornings after milking was saying, “She’s no spring chicken, but she still gets the job done.” Before I left with my straw, I learned he was talking about his old manure spreader.

The other day at the minimart, a fellow paying for gas in front of me said in response to a question from the pierced young woman at the check-out counter, “She’s running all right even if she’s showing some rust.” He was talking about his 1983 Chevy half-ton pickup truck.

We English speakers feel free to apply feminine pronouns to almost anything, even objects that are highly unlikely to possess the qualities of a woman. Sailors, of course, have led the way by insisting for centuries that a boat or a ship is a “she.” There is some news on that front.

Lloyd’s List, the daily journal of shipping news, has announced it will refer to vessels as “it” and no longer as “she.” This has caused considerable consternation in England, where the List is published and where traditions of the sea are taken quite seriously. The Royal Navy, in fact, thought it prudent to announce that its ships will remain feminine.

The List had used “she” and “her” for ships since 1734. When it tried to go to a neutral pronoun several years ago, the attempt was beaten back by irate readers. This time the editor, Julian Bray, is determined to make the banishment of feminine pronouns stick. He was quoted as saying of ships, “They are commodities, they are commercial assets. They are not things that have character—either male or female.”

Strong words, but I dare say Mr. Bray has a point, not just about commercial vessels, but even yachts. No one is quite sure why we call them “she.” John Rousmaniere writes in The Illustrated Dictionary of Boating Terms that the tradition derives from the ancient Egyptian belief that a boat represents a woman who brings the crew good luck. This seems at odds with the fact that English and American sailors long believed that a woman on board meant bad luck, though this didn’t stop them from using the womanly pronoun for their ships. In Salty Words, Robert Hendrickson suggests that giving ships feminine gender was copied by English speaking sailors from seafarers who spoke the romance languages, in all of which, he claims, “the word for ship has the feminine gender.” This is dubious. The fact is, the romance languages don’t agree on the gender of ships. (The French, contrary to their romantic nature, make it masculine.) On the other hand, the word for house is feminine in all of the romance languages. (She’s a three-bedroom colonial?)

Pardon me if I take all of this with a grain of salt. I’m convinced boats were made feminine simply because they were beautiful. “She” for ships dates to a time when ships were sailing vessels and even the crudest of them displayed qualities of feminine beauty when sails were set and drawing. It is relevant that the ideal of beauty for both women and sailboats has been described as a symphony of curves.

Still, the feminine pronoun should not be applied indiscriminately to watercraft, which is why Lloyd’s List is on the right course. We’ve been grappling with this for years at SAILING. In every issue you will find sailboats referred to as “she” and “it.” Before the fiberglass revolution, when every boat was a custom-built individual, it was probably easier to use “she.” Since they have been cloned like, as an unkind wag once said, so many Chlorox bottles, it can be awkward to assign a gender. Our rule of thumb is to refer to a boat as “it” before it acquires an owner and a name. A boat displayed at a show or an unsold model provided for a boat test is an “it.” On the other hand, when one of the clones is owned and named and probably loved and featured in, say, a story about cruising in Maine, she’s a “she.”

Then there’s the matter of a boat’s character. No matter what the Royal Navy says, calling an aircraft carrier “she” is stretching the language pretty far to preserve a tradition. I’m afraid multihulls are not good candidates for feminine pronouns either. They have a certain functional beauty, but let’s face it, instead of symphonies of curves, most of them are cacophonies of angles. I’m sorry, but a dreadnought like the 125-foot catamaran PlayStation can’t possibly have a feminine side.

Which brings up the matter of the effect on gender of names, particularly those clumsy sponsors’ monikers. Is News Corporation, a boat currently competing in the Volvo Ocean Race, really a “she?”

As for my own boats, I’ve been comfortable referring to all of them as “she,” except one. In fact, in the glow of particularly exhilarating racing outings, I’ve been tempted to call a couple of them “dear.” The things I’ve called the boat that was the exception are not printable. It was seriously overweight, and the extra tonnage combined with the illogical bumps and turns of the racing rule then in effect (IOR) gave the hull the uncanny ability to glue itself to the water in light air. We knew it was going to be a bad day when the boat would lose steerage way, turn its fat stern to the zephyrs and let wavelets overtake it and beat a mocking tattoo on its counter. The boat is long gone, but I still think of it as a big, beer-bellied galoot too lazy to move off the couch. I guess that would make it a “he.”

As jarring as it may sound to call a boat “he,” a writer in The New Yorker recently recommended the use of the male pronoun for some vessels, including warships and “powerboats whose prows rise phallically out of the water.”

The symbolism may be a bit over the top, but there’s no doubt that some boats project a male personality. Consider the Cigarette type of muscle-motorboat. Members of this hairy-chested species of yacht play the barroom bully, all macho swagger and earsplitting bluster, defiling the sailing environment with trails of aural corruption as they parade about in exercises that seem to have no other purpose than to show off like a male gorilla in a mating ritual. You can use many words to describe these vessels, but certainly not a feminine pronoun. My farmer friend’s manure spreader makes a stronger claim to being a “she” than one of them.