The nautical world is a distinctive culture with its own art, traditions, lore, literature, history, idioms and even its own legal canon. While the associated body of knowledge is as big as the sea itself, there is a core of information that is vital to understanding maritime history and popular culture. A few specialized dictionaries have compiled and glossed nautical/maritime terminology, but "The Dictionary of Nautical Literacy" is the first to chart the culture of the sea. Avoiding trivial as well as all too familiar entries, it will identify and define the important spectrum of nautical knowledge in 3,500 or so concise entries on literature, art, history, science, engineering, language, geography, law, commerce, warfare and sociology. Unlike other nautical dictionaries that concentrate on defining parts of a ship and sailor slang, this book identifies ideas, events and individuals and explains their significance in our maritime culture, placing them in context.
Moreover, this book is quite contemporary and is approached from a decidedly American point of view, thus further distinguishing it from the wonderful but somewhat antiquated and British "Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea". Formidable in scope and scholarhip, "The Dictionary of Nautical Literacy" should help thousands make sense of what they hear, read, see and learn, deepen their knowledge of the nautical world, and better appreciate their maritime experiences, whether of the armchair or first hand variety. It is designed to be the "must have" desk reference for anyone with the slightest nautical inclination - from professional mariners and serious students to the millions of casual sailors and fans of novelists Patrick O'Brian and Alexander Kent and nonfiction writers such as Sebastian Junger and William F. Buckley, Jr.