THE SPORT OF ROWING aged to think and later to coach for him- self.”8837 Indeed, the word “crew” was and still is used in America in New England prep schools and Ivy League colleges to describe their elite branch of the sport, rowing eights or fours against opponents that look very much like themselves. As the sport has grown and diversified, the portion of the sport of rowing which can properly be de- scribed as “crew” has become a smaller and smaller piece of the overall pie. Using the word “crew” to describe club rowing, small-boat rowing or sculling, in- deed any branch of the sport beyond the tra- ditional school and college teams in eights and fours, is certainly at least mildly inap- propriate. And since the word “crew” is often used in other contexts, as in a maintenance crew or the crew of a sailboat, the unambiguous term “rowing” is often substituted today, even at Harvard and Yale, and the use of the word “crew” to even mean the sport of aca- demic rowing has come to be seen as old fashioned by some. As always, the use of the redundant term “crew team” should be avoided at all costs. Shell While we are on the subject of rowing words commonly used in America and dis- dained in the home country and its former colonies, perhaps first on that list is “shell”, a term first used in the mid-19th Century by boat builders in America to describe boats with smooth carvel hulls and internal keel- sons. These innovations more-or-less coin- cided with the introduction of metal outrig- gers in 1845 so that within a period of just a very few years the appearance of boats was utterly transformed from their 18th Century predecessors into craft with dimensions that closely resemble the racing boats of today. 8837 Haig-Thomas & Nicholson, p. 121 Initially, the skins of shells were con- structed of thin sheets of wood and even of corrugated paper supported by an internal skeletal structure of wooden ribs and bulk- heads. Beginning in the mid-20th Century, as more modern materials such as plywood, fiberglass, honeycomb and eventually car- bon fiber, were employed, the internal skele- ton became increasingly superfluous as the hulls themselves came to provide their own structural integrity. In aircraft and automo- bile design, this is termed monocoque con- struction. For those of us Americans old enough to remember the fragility of the wooden boats of our youth, the term “shell”, conjuring up egg shells, seems completely appropriate, but in some quarters of the British Com- monwealth, the term is met with remarkable derision, striking your author as an example of “if we didn’t think it up first, it must be wrong.” Coxswain’s Commands Nowhere is the degradation of rowing language more evident than in coxswain’s commands. Way Enough! The most important thing anybody can say in any rowing context is “Way enough!” or “Way ‘nuff!” as it often comes out in the real world out on the water. This is an ar- chaic term, centuries old, tested and found true.8838 It is the command to stop immediately whatever you are doing, whether that be 8838 The expression is sometimes misspelled as “Weigh enough.” A sailor can “Weigh anchor,” but the “way” in “Way enough” refers to the fact that the boat was “making way,” going some- where, and now it is time to terminate that. “Way, as in ‘under way,’ is a horizontal movement. Thus, ‘way enough’ is to stop hori- zontal movement.” – Bill Miller 2497
