This week’s theme
Is it a noun or a verb? Both!

This week’s words
windbag
rizz
deadname
gundeck

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(GUHN-dek)

MEANING:

noun: The deck carrying guns on a warship.
verb tr.: To falsify or fabricate.

ETYMOLOGY:

From gun + deck. Earliest documented use: noun: 1649, verb: early 20th c.

NOTES:

A gun deck is literally the deck on a warship where the guns are mounted. The verb sense, however, has nothing to do with artillery and everything to do with evasion.

It probably comes from the practice of some midshipmen to fabricate the numbers. They were expected to calculate a ship’s position using real observations, such as star sights at night and sun sights at noon. Some shirkers instead retreated to the gundeck and simply extrapolated the numbers from previous readings. Thus, to gundeck came to mean to fake the work.

USAGE:

“Just because others might have gundecked their preventive maintenance did not mean he would.”
David E. Meadows; Echo Class; Berkeley; 2009.

“Should that assessment be modified based on the likelihood that he knowingly filed a false report about the Battle of Midway? Or given the circumstances of 13 Jun 1942, was his decision to gundeck the story of the flight to nowhere a reasonable one?”
Craig L. Symonds; Mitscher and the Mystery of Midway; Naval History (Annapolis, Maryland); Jun 2012.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: