Yacht

[Dr. Goodword]

• yacht •

Pronunciation: yaht • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. A sailboat designed for racing. 2. A luxury boat used privately or officially for pleasure cruising.

Notes: This word has been in English long enough to have bred a small family of derivations. Someone who owns or sails a yacht may be called a yachtsman. Yachter seems to have died or become chronically ill shortly after birth. Things related to yachts or yachting are all yachty.

In Play: Yachts with sails may be used to race for various cups: "Larry Ellis's yacht won the Hick Cup 5 years in a row once he stopped captaining it." Since other yachts are luxury boats, they tend to be pricy: "If you have to ask the price of a yacht, you probably aren't wealthy enough to own one."

Word History: In Middle English, this word was spelled and pronounced yeaghe, and it referred to a light, fast-sailing ship. The word was borrowed from early Modern Dutch jaght or Middle Low German jacht, shortened form of jachtschip "chase ship", so called because they usually belonged to pirates. Jacht "chase" was the noun from jagen "to chase, hunt", that came down to Modern German as Jagd. The word in Proto-Germanic was yago-, inherited from the Proto-Indo-European root yagh- "to hunt; wish for". The PIE word must have died out in all but the Germanic languages. We find evidence of it in the ancient languages, Hittite ekt- "hunting net" and Sanskrit yahu- "restless, mischief-making", but not in their descendants. (Joakim Larsson probably suggested today's nautical Good Word from the fo'c'sle of his Swedish yacht.)

[call_copse]

I'm sure the Oracle founder will be pleased to be (nearly) namechecked!

[George Kovac]

Here in south Florida, we see a lot of yachts. But my most vivid association with the word is the following:

When our son was learning to read, we gave him an alphabet book that paired two nouns which each began with the same letter. Each page contained a picture as a suggestion to help the fledgling reader guess his way into literacy. The cartoonish images usually featured an animal and an inanimate object. For example, the first page showed an “ant on an apple.” But my son, anticipating his adult preference for Good Words over ordinary ones, failed on the letter B. For that letter, the book’s illustrator thought she had drawn a “buffalo on a boat” but my son pronounced it a “yak on a yacht.”

[misterdoe]

This etymology intrigued me enough to go and look up Jägermeister , which based on "yacht" I expected to have something to do with a high-ranking pirate. I was way off. Here's what I found:

Curt Mast, the original distiller of Jägermeister and son of the founder Wilhelm, was an enthusiastic hunter. The name literally translated means "Hunting Master". It is a title for a high-ranking official in charge of matters related to hunting and gamekeeping. The term Jägermeister had existed as a job title for many centuries. It was redefined in 1934 in the new Reichsjagdgesetz (Imperial Hunting Law), which applied the term to senior foresters, game wardens, and gamekeepers in the German civil service. Hermann Göring was appointed Reichsjägermeister (Imperial Gamekeeper) when the new hunting law was introduced. Thus, when Jägermeister was introduced in 1935, its name was already familiar to Germans—it was sometimes called "Göring-Schnaps."
(Wikipedia)