This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:
Ships This article is within the scope of WikiProject Ships, a project to improve all Ship-related articles. If you would like to help improve this and other articles, please join the project, or contribute to the project discussion. All interested editors are welcome. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.ShipsWikipedia:WikiProject ShipsTemplate:WikiProject ShipsShips

if a fore castle has many cabins, How many beds for sailoors would there be in all? Classifying various dictionaries by what pronunciations they accept of this word, which dictionaries accept which pronunciation(s)?? Any dictionary of the English language is okay with me as a choice, but Wiktionary is not. 66.32.131.87 20:34, 10 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

Added fo'c's'le, the spelling from Webster's dictionary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.107.123.198 (talk) 03:45, 27 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Our colleagues have annotated with the following refs :

1. Oxford dictionary search, retrieved 2013-08-22, gives "fo'c'sle"

2. Collins dictionary search, retrieved 2013-08-22, gives "fo'c's'le or fo'c'sle"

(And ‘tis right that we have.)

Nevertheless, surely we could come up with a source that verifies this: the contraction cannot be dismissed as simply dialect and/or sloppy speech. I mean to say — tho I don’t specifically recall it from the Aubrey-Maturin novels — that their (sainted martial-historical-fiction/war-novelauthor was surely of the same opinion as am I. Of course, he is the better (even if perhaps not *fully* WP:RS-grade) authority. Etymology reconstructs verbal history, which is an entity studded with metaphor. And with its bosom buddies(to wit,

• imitative gestures and sounds
• desperate analogies
• similes, and eventually metaphors, etymological innovations, and many good old comfortable lies.

JerzyA (talk) 18:52, 11 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

   Oh, I remember the point of that: neither spelling is likely to reflect solely simply haste, educational, folkways, etc. ad infinitum: the occasions for screaming “All Hands to the Foc’s’l!” in the heat of combat are urgent ones, and such contraction has the tactical function of brevity, outweighing the pride of precision, and the avoidance the appearances of deficient refinement by vocal elision: war and piracy are hell, and those who need the the addition of “... without delay, lest our respected counterparts use our guts for garters!” contribute to mutual survival, if they dispense wi’ fh, nicety our pronouncin’ ev’ry bleedin’ phoneme before getting on to the task of repelling predacious opposing combat personnel. Eh?

   Ya’know, jes’ fer wha’i’s werth.
--JerzyA (talk) 19:55, 11 May 2020 (UTC)Reply