gaffe

Old French gaffe meant 'a hook' — a curved iron instrument used to grab, pull, and hold. Provençal fishermen used gaffs to haul large fish aboard. The word entered English by the 1300s with this fishing meaning intact. But sailors soon extended it to the spar — a long pole with a curved end — used to spread the head of a fore-and-aft sail. The shape was the connection: both the fishing gaff and the sail gaff had a hook or curve at one end.

The gaff rig dominated European and American sailing from the 1600s through the early 1900s. A gaff-rigged vessel carried a four-sided sail suspended from a spar that angled upward from the mast. The rig was versatile, powerful in light air, and could be handled by a small crew. Schooners, sloops, ketches, and cutters all used gaff rigs. The fishing fleets of Gloucester, Massachusetts ran gaff-rigged schooners that became the fastest working vessels in the Atlantic.

Joshua Slocum sailed his gaff-rigged sloop Spray around the world alone in 1895-1898, the first solo circumnavigation in history. The gaff rig made it possible — one man could raise and lower the sails without help, because the gaff acted as a mechanical advantage, distributing the sail's weight along its length. Slocum's achievement was as much about the rig as the man.

The Bermuda rig — a triangular sail on a tall mast — replaced the gaff rig on most yachts by the 1930s. Gaff-rigged vessels survive as classics, raced at regattas and preserved in maritime museums. The word gaff itself split: the fishing hook kept its original meaning, the sailing spar kept its nautical meaning, and British slang added 'to blow the gaff' — to reveal a secret — possibly from the idea of hooking hidden information into the open.