1224. This week, we look at why English speakers call ships "she," even when the ship is named Henry. Then we have a follow-up on "maxxing" from two listeners, including its roots in 1990s gaming and a cameo in the "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" theme song.
1224. This week, we look at why English speakers call ships "she," even when the ship is named Henry. Then we have a follow-up on "maxxing" from two listeners, including its roots in 1990s gaming and a cameo in the "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" theme song.
The ships segment was written by Karen Lunde. Find her on igofirst.org.
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. This week, we'll talk about why we call ships "she," and then I have a follow-up on "maxxing" and a familect I found in a novel.
by Karen Lunde
Humans are pretty incurable when it comes to personification. We apologize to our phones when we drop them, threaten our printers when they act up, and beg our cars to make it just one more mile when the gas gauge is on empty. So maybe it shouldn't surprise us when a sailor looks fondly at a huge boat bobbing in the water and says, "She's a sturdy ship!"
But why do we call ships "she"? In English, we usually call objects "it" — a genderless pronoun. But English speakers have called ships "she" for centuries, even when the ship has a traditionally masculine name. In his book "English Grammar," published in 1640, Ben Jonson put objects in the "neuter" category — that's the grammatical gender name for nouns that aren't masculine or feminine. But he singled out ships as the exception. He wrote:
“We say, shee sayles well, though the name be Hercules, or Henry, or the Prince.”
Jonson wasn't the first person to call ships "she," but he's the first grammarian we know of who explicitly called out ships as an exception to the typical English pronoun system.
So, if even ships named Hercules are called "she," the next logical question is: Why?
You might wonder if an explanation lies in older English grammar from a time when tall ships roamed the seas. Old English actually did assign grammatical gender to nouns, much the way modern German does. That doesn't mean, of course, that your fork is a girl, your spoon is a boy, and your knife has no gender at all, even though those are the grammatical genders German assigns to them.
But grammatical gender isn't actually primitive personification. Early Germans didn't decide that a fork seemed feminine and a spoon seemed masculine. They're really just noun classes. So, if anything, it's the names of those noun classes that are misleading.
Maybe that's it, then! Do we call ships "she" because their noun class used to be feminine in Old English? Nope! This theory sinks almost immediately. The Old English word for "ship" — "scip" — wasn't feminine. It was neuter. So, there's no straightforward grammatical fossil in play there either.
In fact, the earliest examples of ships being called "she" didn't show up while English still had grammatical gender. They appeared in the late 1300s, after that system was already fading away.
One of the earliest examples cited by the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary comes from John Barbour's "The Bruce," an epic poem written around 1375 in Older Scots, a close relative of Middle English. I won't attempt to read it in Older Scots, but here's the modernized translation:
“And they soon lightened their ship and then rowed with all their might; and she, having been made so light, went sliding through the sea.”
The ship itself isn't named after a woman in Barbour's passage. Even so, he uses "scho" — an Older Scots form of "she" — in more than one place, which tells us it's probably not just a one-off artistic flourish.
So, that example from the late 1300s gives us a hint about when the practice of calling ships "she" existed, but it doesn't explain why it began. The mystery continues! So how did ships get the "she" label, then?
Another clue could lie in what happened after English lost grammatical gender. Once nouns no longer came with built-in masculine or feminine labels, calling an object "he" or "she" became a choice instead of a grammatical obligation. And that meant the choice could carry meaning.
And we still do this today! If your car has trouble starting on a freezing morning, you might say something like, "She's a little temperamental from the cold!" I even know someone who named their car Data, after the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" character, and they call the Prius "he" to match.
In 1933, Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that maybe using "he" or "she" for an inanimate object like your car, boat, or lawn tractor was a way of expressing affection or even sympathy. As he put it, it lifts the object "above the inanimate sphere." He wasn't saying that ships were like women, but more that using a word like "it" for something you're attached to can feel kind of emotionally flat.
And maybe that's why ships aren't the only things English-speakers treat this way. Historically, people have also used feminine pronouns for things like countries, cities, churches, and even tools and weapons.
So, the English language shift away from gendered nouns is one plausible explanation, but it's not the only theory. Sailors take pride in the ships that shelter and sustain them during long voyages. So sources like the Imperial War Museums suggest that sailors historically called ships "she" because they related them to protective mothers or even goddesses. But that's just one idea, and not an established origin story.
There's also the theory that a lot of ships and boats were named after women, so calling them "she" just made sense. Just like they are today, boats across history were often named for queens, goddesses, saints, wives, and even sweethearts. That definitely could have reinforced the feminine link, but it doesn't explain the pronoun convention itself. As we already talked about, not all ships are named after women, but even a big ol' boat named Henry can take the "she" pronoun proudly.
It turns out historians and linguists alike haven't discovered some medieval decree that says all ships must have a feminine identity. And so the unsatisfying answer to the question of why ships are called "she" is … we don't really know for sure.
So, is it still correct to call a ship "she"? In everyday life, sure. It's perfectly recognizable, traditional, and still genuinely used in a colloquial sense. But in more formal writing, you might want to take another tack. The Chicago Manual of Style says to avoid feminine pronouns for ships and other nonliving entities. And the Associated Press uses "it" for ships except in quotes.
And then we have the famous maritime defection! In 2002, "Lloyd's List," one of the shipping industry's oldest and best-known publications, officially dropped "she" for "it." The publication had actually tried to ditch the gendered pronoun four years earlier but reversed course when people protested the change. But in the end, editorial rationale won out. It was decided that modern commercial ships were assets or commodities, and not gendered characters.
But despite the modern shift away from "she", we're not quite done calling ships by the feminine pronoun. When it comes to the Royal Navy and the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, the "she" pronoun is still standing proudly on the bow. Both continue to use it in official writing.
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a career writer and editor. She writes I'll Go First, a newsletter where she shares her story, then hands you a writing prompt and a metaphorical pen. Find her on igofirst.org.
Before we get to the familect, I have a couple of listener comments about the history of "maxxing," which I talked about last week with Roger Kreuz. We said one of the first uses was in 1990s online gaming with the term min-maxing, which we said related to character attributes, where you might want to minimize certain characteristics of your character and maximize others.
But a listener named Moriko, who was a gamer in the '90s, said it went beyond that, and also involved getting the maximum reward, such as points or loot, with the minimum effort.
Here's the example Moriko gave me. Imagine a game where you can hunt bunnies or dragons. A dragon is worth a lot of points, and a bunny is worth almost nothing, so dragons seem like the obvious target. But if you can find a spell that wipes out a hundred bunnies at once, the bunnies start paying out better than the dragon, and hunting dragons becomes a waste of your time. The min-max part is finding that shortcut — the biggest payoff for the smallest investment.
Moriko also pointed out that game designers don't always appreciate min-maxing. If players find a trick like that, the developers might ban the player, make the bunnies tougher ("buff them" as gamers would say), or weaken the spell — something gamers call "nerfing," a term we actually talked about a few months ago in episode 1206 about gaming slang.
Thanks, Moriko!
And a listener named Peter who was stuck in back-to-school traffic wrote in to point out that the theme song from the TV show "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air," released in 1992 included the term "maxxing." Here's part of the verse:
In West Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground is where I spent most of my days
Chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool
And all shootin' some b-ball outside of the school
Boom! So that's another example from the early '90s, and in a more mainstream usage than gamer slang. That show was very popular back then. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Peter.
Finally, I have a familect that I was especially excited about because it's the first time I've heard a familect in a novel! I was listening to the audiobook of "When We Were Real" by Daryl Gregory, and then there was this:
She still can't believe her mother demanded to come into the distillery with the rest of the group.
When Beth Ann was 10, her father took the family to Myrtle Beach, a rare vacation outside Clay County, North Carolina. On the way, they stopped at a chain restaurant they'd visited back at home many times. Halfway through the meal, Beth Ann's sister came back from the bathroom with a shocked look on her face. "Daddy," she said, "you've got to see this."
Beth Ann followed them into the next room, and there it was: a full bar, the first she'd ever seen. A stunning number of liquor bottles stood on the set of shelves, lighted shelves, like brazen hussies. Her father turned red-faced and marched out, leading his wife and daughters back to the car, where Mama burst into tears and wailed, "How could Ruby Tuesday do this to us?"
That became a family punchline. The car gets a flat, "How could Ruby Tuesday do this to us?" Septic tank backed up, Ruby again. Beth Ann and her sister told the story of the great restaurant betrayal many times over the years, always getting a laugh. It even killed at the potluck after Dad's funeral.
Woohoo! A straight up familect in the novel. I really enjoyed the whole book, again called "When We Were Real" — it's about people who discover they are living in a simulation. It was a great story that I also thought had great writing, and thank you to Daryl for giving me permission to play this little snippet in the podcast.
He said his family had a lot of familects, and I know some of yours did too. If you want to share yours, it's easy to send it to me. You can leave a message on the voicemail line or record it on your phone or computer using Speakpipe. And the phone number for the voicemail and link for Speakpipe are in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoopes; Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Maram Elnagheeb; Holly Hutchings; Dan Feierabend; and Steven Schapansky, who really likes to sit on the floor.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to like and subscribe.