To Scoon

This is so incredibly cool.

For several months, we've been looking for a book on the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and I finally found a hardback copy of James B. Connolly's The Port of Gloucester, 1940, first edition. I am reading it very slowly, reading a chapter or so whenever we visit Gloucester. The book appears to be written by a grandfather so that it could be read by his eight-year-old granddaughter. It is a pleasure to read.

On page 39, The Port of Gloucester:

During shipbuilding intervals in the French and Indian wars, [Andrew] Robinson built this particular vessel, gave her a new kind of rig. He then took to wondering what name he would give the new rig. The launching day arrived; the usual number of spectators were standing by. Robinson had yet to think up a name for the new rig. As the vessel slid smoothly into the water, an excited spectator cried: "Oh, how she scoons!"

"A scooner let her be!" said the quick-witted Robinson.

People who know nothing of another single incident in Gloucester's history can quote that one of how the word "schooner" came into being. The spectator who contributed that new work to the English language deserves to be remembered, but no town clerk ever thought to make a record of his names; and only because of that incident is the name of the first-class Indian fighter and competent shipbuilder, Andrew Robinson, now recalled by the outside world.

I found The Port of Gloucester in a used book store in downtown Boston, across from the Common.

Last week, while visiting Williston, I picked up a copy of H. L. Mencken's The American Language, and have been reading it, also, and, likewise, very slowly, enjoying the writing.

On pages 116 - 117, the follow passage from H. L. Mencken:

Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the Eighteenth Century, among them, schooner, cat-boat, mud-scow and pungy. According to an historian of the American merchant marine (Williams Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre, New York, 1916, p. 15), the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled scooner. To scoon was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: Oh, see how she scoons!" A scooner let her be!" replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her builder -- and all boats of her peculiar an dnovel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Scotch verb came from the Norse skunna, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German. 

James B. Connolly did not cite his source, but most likely it was the same source as Mencken cited.

I came across these two books in two completely different locations, and had no idea there would be any link.