Recommend me to your friends

Tuesday 26 April 2011

Why are cruise ships always named after women?

Who's her you ask, the cats mother?
But it's a good point I think; why are cruise ships always named after women, or refereed to as a her? Off the top of my head, and I'm prepared to stand corrected here, I could only think of one cruise ship currently in service named after a man and that's the Paul Gauguin, named after the French impressionist of the same name. So why is this; how did this situation arise?
Well as always there's no easy answer to the question, however there are a couple of pretty good theories to explain it........
The first theory, which to be honest I think is the weakest theory, is that ships tend to be named after women because in 'ye olden days' ships tended to be named after Goddesses and other mythical feminine figures and over time this transmuted into popular female names.
Whilst certainly interesting and if you go back in time there are a lot of ships named after goddesses to support this theory, it doesn't really answer the question of why this tradition got started in the first place, rather it just shifts the problem further back in time. Why name a ship after a goddess rather than a God?

The second theory, which I feel carries a lot more weight states that a lot of European languages like German and French have a complex system of of assigning masculine and feminine terms to specific words. In fact old English also used to do this and under most of these systems boats, ships and other water going vessels used to be feminine words, thus making it much more likely for them to be given female names.

The third theory, which may even be weaker than the first one states that sailors didn't feel comfortable on a ship without some kind of female to feel close to, although given how superstitious some sailors used to be about women onboard I'm not too sure about this one either.

So what do you think? Which theory do you think is more likely? Or have you heard any other theories that make more sense? Let me know what you think back here.

Happy cruising

1 comment:

  1. It's really interesting, different information we got it here.

    Really nice information, Great to read about this.

    Cruise in Goa
    Cruise Packages in Goa


    ReplyDelete