Batten down the hatches Tony, looks like a bit of a storm is rolling in for the weekend.
We're getting rain over the weekend as well. Was planning on bundling up and hitting the links tomorrow, but that's been scuppered now.
Guess we're going nautical today.
I wasn't familiar with scupper, had to look that one up.
In fairness, I didn't know it had a nautical background. But it's a great word.
I did know it had a nautical origin, and what it was, and your usage threw me for a moment. Nouns don't get turned into verbs often in nautical settings because it can create imprecision that can easily get you killed. And a traditional scupper doesn't visually lend itself to the metaphor. So I had to parse. Your usage makes perfect sense, you had a golf game on deck (planned) and it got washed overboard through the scuppers. It just didn't align with the nautical paradigms in my brain at first.
Sounds like we've all expanded our minds today, it's good day to be on the banter.
Interestingly, the term "batten down the hatches," borrows a non-nautical term. A batten is a thin strip of wood. Used in construction, a set of battens can increase the rigidity of a load-bearing assembly made of larger pieces of wood.
On old sailing vessels, hatchways didn't have covers, or if they did they had a latticework to allow ventilation of lower decks - and since the old ships didn't have running water or showers, ventilation was, uh, really important.
To prepare for heavy weather, sailcloth coverings would be spread over the hatchways, and then strips of wood - battens - were nailed to the deck around the perimeter of the canvas. So, they "battened down the hatchways."
In modern sailing parlance, a batten is inserted into a pocket on a sail to provide rigidity and mitigate "lufting" (flapping) in low or inconsistent wind conditions, and provide strength to the sail in heavy wind conditions.
