cunningham

Briggs Swift Cunningham II was born in Cincinnati in 1907, heir to a soap fortune, and spent his life racing: yachts in Long Island Sound, Bugattis at Le Mans, Jaguars in Florida. Among his techniques on the water was a line threaded through a cringle punched just above the tack of the mainsail, allowing the crew to tension the luff without altering overall sail area. It was simple, effective, and unnamed. No one called it anything but what worked.

The trick circulated through America's Cup circles and Newport Yacht Club regattas in the 1950s, identified with the man who used it consistently and winningly. Sailors began calling it the cunningham because Cunningham did it, and did it well. By the early 1960s, when it appeared in sailing manuals and training texts, it had already done the harder grammatical work: lowercase, a common noun, belonging to the language rather than the man.

The shift from proper noun to common noun is a small ceremony that language performs when a person's invention escapes the inventor. Aspirin lost its capital A in 1919 by court order; cunningham lost its by consensus, sailor by sailor, in cold water and hard wind. The word entered dictionaries as a noun describing a specific piece of sail hardware: a control that adjusts tension along a sail's leading edge.

Briggs Cunningham died in 2003, at 96, having raced competitively into his eighties. The America's Cup campaigns he mounted did not bring him the cup, but they left him in the language. Every dinghy sailor who trims a cunningham on a gusty afternoon is invoking, without knowing it, a Cincinnati heir who understood that sail shape is everything.