I just booked a trip for the last week of May when I'll be heading down to Bequia, the largest island in the Grenadine chain. While there I've reserved space on The Friendship Rose, a large schooner which makes regular daytrips to the Tobago Cays. Schooner is an odd word--no one is really sure where it came from. Supposedly the style was originated in a Gloucester, MA shipyard in the early 18th c. and it's thought that schooner may come from a since-forgotten New England verb similar to the Scottish scon, meaning "to send over water, to skip stones." Per the OED,

When the first schooner was being launched, a bystander exclaimed ‘Oh, how she scoons!’ The builder, Capt. Andrew Robinson, replied, ‘A scooner let her be!’ and the word at once came into use as the name of the new type of vessel. The anecdote, first recorded, on the authority of tradition, in a letter of 1790 (quoted in Babson Hist. Gloucester, p. 252), looks like an invention.

schooner [Online Etymology Dictionary]
schooner [OED]

Labels: Scottish Gaelic, The Daily Hump

"Schooner" is the name Trey MacDougal gives his manly parts on an episode of Sex and the City, when he and Charlotte are trying to cope with the fact that he's impotent. They go to a therapist who tells them to name their stuff; Charlotte gets excited and goes "Rebecca!" as though she's been waiting to name her vagina all these years. Trey can't think of anything, mostly b/c he's just really uncomfortable with this exercise. The following dialogue ensues:

Charlotte: Well...Trey loves to sail...how about canoe?

Trey: Canoe? No. Canoe does not go with Rebecca.

Charlotte (getting annoyed he can't get it up): Well what then?

Trey: How about...Schooner?

Charlotte: Schooner's good! Schooner's good. Rebecca and Schooner!

[Therapist instructs them to use their names that night in an erotic fantasy]

Charlotte: You pull me off my unicorn, you tear away my gossamer petticoats, and you put your schooner deep inside my Rebecca.

Basically-- you watch Sex and the City. And might be gay.

At least I don't have creepy people Googling my name looking for photos of me. And creepy people sending me letters from prison. How's that working out for you?