The adjective meaning "related to sailing and ships" is <em>nautical.</em> As with other specialized fields, there is a large nautical vocabulary. England has a long seagoing tradition. They used to say "England rules the waves." Some nautical phrases have found their way into everyday English. People often use them without even thinking about their literal meaning. Here are three.

To set the scene, imagine a wind that is blowing directly from the east. It is pushing everything in it directly west. Someone who doesn't know sailing might think a ship with sails would be pushed west and couldn't go in any other direction. In reality, the ship can reach destinations that are to the east of it. It just can't sail <em>straight</em> east.

By steering the ship in the desired direction and setting the sail at the correct angle, the ship can go directions other than directly west. It can obviously go <em>north</em>west, with the wind behind it at an angle. You can probably see how it can go north. The wind can push the angled sail sideways, like pushing down on a watermelon seed and having it scoot sideways under your thumb. It can even go northeast and southeast, although this is hard to explain without diagrams. It just can't go <em>straight</em> east. So it can effectively <em>travel</em> eastward by taking a zigzag path, northeast for a while and then southeast for a while. Each zigzag requires more than just steering in a new direction, it requires adjusting the angle of the sails. On a big sailing ship, dozens of sailors would need to pull on ropes and turn many sails. The maneuver is called "tacking." The ship "takes another tack."

If a boat is sailing northeast when the wind is from the east, it is sailing at an angle of 45° to the wind. To make as much eastward progress as possible, you'd like to waste as little time as possible zigzagging north and south. You'd like to sail as close to the east as possible. How close to the wind can a boat sail? It depends on how good a grip the sailboat can get on the water, how hard the wind is pushing on the boat itself, and how well the sails work. Boats built specifically for yacht racing, where nothing matters but performance, may be able to sail as close as 35° to the wind. A big, wide ("beamy") boat, built to carry as much cargo as possible, might not be able to sail even 45° from the wind.

From this, we get several everyday expressions.

1) <em>You're sailing too close to the wind.</em> In everyday speech this means "you are almost breaking a rule; you are being dangerously bold." The literal meaning in sailing is that you are too close to the limit of what your boat can do. If you sail any closer, the sails will suddenly go slack, and the wind will just start pushing the boat backward, toward the west.

2) <em>I was taken aback.</em> In everyday speech this means "I was stunned, surprised, and shocked, and couldn't do anything right away." In sailing, it is exactly what happens when you sail too close to the wind. To be "taken aback" means that the boat suddenly stops going forward and begins to be blown backward by the wind. In order to recover from this, the sailors need some time to make some complicated adjustments to the sails. So, literally, being "taken aback" happens suddenly, and can't be corrected instantly.

3) <em>Let's try a different tack.</em> In everyday speech this means you are trying to solve a problem and getting nowhere, and someone suggests changing direction and thinking about a different approach. The literal meaning of "a different tack" in sailing means to adjust all the sails and change the direction of the ship, in the zigzag maneuver of "tacking into the wind."

P.S. On a personal note, there is a wonderful series of about twenty novels by Patrick O'Brian; it is often called the "Aubrey/Maturin" series, after the names of two recurring characters. The setting is the British navy around the early 1800s. These are very long novels, written in difficult English. It is even more difficult because O'Brian laces his writing with hundreds of nautical terms from the 1800s. There are terms that most ordinary English-speakers do not know. When I was reading the series, my wife made me a gift of <em>A Sea of Words,</em> which is a <em>whole book</em> devoted to nothing but defining and explaining all of the terms O'Brian uses. I don't recommend these novels to anyone who isn't an advanced English speaker--but I do strongly recommend <em>A Sea of Words</em> to anybody who <em>is</em> reading them!

P.P.S. England rules the waves, but England never waives the rules. <--- Pun, play on words.