I am reading Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" and in his account of the ocean crossing, he uses the word "avast".
Common word in sea stories, but it occurredto me that I didn't know its etymology:
avast
interj.
5< Du hou‘vast, houd vast, hold fast6 Naut. stop! cease! halt!
Reminds me of old joke about little Johnny cutting the toilet seat in half, because he heard his father say that some of his mother's half vast relatives were coming to visit.
Trivia note: Mark Twain tells about the passenger who thought he had been swindled when he bought his watch for
$150, only to have it not keep right time on shipboard.
Allowing for inflation that was indeed an expensive watch.
That was almost a hundred and fifty years ago, right after the Civil War. Price of a stamp has increased almost twenty fold since I was young. I wonder how many months pay $150 was in 1867.
