Terminology -- "Stateroom"

[Dockhead]

Some people don't care much about words -- and that's a perfectly reasonable life choice.

Other people do -- and that would be me, probably as the result of spending most of my adult life struggling with new languages, plus being the disappointingly inarticulate descendant of four generations of writers.

I've bored some of you already with my opinions about the use of the word "rope".

Not leaving well enough alone, I'm now going to bore you with my opinions about the word "stateroom".

For full disclosure, my agenda on sailing terminology is twofold: (1) terms should be used precisely, because it makes for better communication and understanding; but (2) terms should not be used as pretentious synonyms for land terms, adding no meaning, just to show off that we are sailors. Actually these two points are entirely consistent with one another, because a term used as a pretentious synonym is not adding any meaning, so can't be said to be used precisely.

I particularly hate the pretentious synonym thing, and so I condemn the insistence on "line" as a synonym for the perfectly good -- but more specific in its application -- word "rope", and "head" as a synonym for "toilet" ("the heads" are, rather, the space in which the toilet, or bucket , is installed).

Now to "stateroom". How in the world did this get into our vocabularies? State Room is a Room of State, a grand room in a palace, possibly stretched to cover a really grand cabin on a really big ship, made for the queen, like the presidential suite in a top class hotel. How could anyone think that this could be an appropriate term for a tiny, dark, spartan, cabin in a little, plastic sailboat?

My guess is that it's marketing BS evolved through several generations of constantly inflating absurdity. From Room of State on the royal yacht, it became a pretentious term for expensive cabins on transatlantic steamships, on to cruise ship cabins, and finally some over-exuberant advertising copywriter got hold of it for some boat brochure, somewhere, from which this disease spread to the lips of some cruisers.

To my ear, you might as well call the en-suite master bedroom in a three bed, two bath ranch house, the "royal apartments", and the little eat-in kitchen the "banqueting hall". Does it not sound like that to anyone else?

Whew, glad I got that off my chest!