Yeah, it sounds like that thing your dog keeps doing on the nice carpet whenever you have company over. But actually scuttlebutt has nothing to do with itchy bums scooting across your grandmother’s shag. Scuttlebutt is an old-timey word for ‘gossip’—or a synonym for ‘factoid‘. But how did such a silly word come to mean telling tales out of school? Well, that’s an interesting story…
A Sailor’s Butt
Scuttle comes from the Old French escoutille meaning ‘hatchway’. And on a ship, the term scuttle refers to a “small hole or port cut either in the deck or side of a ship” 1. Scuttle may refer to anything from a porthole on the side of a ship to sometimes even a doorway. How do you know if you’re talking about a hatchway or a scuttle? Well, “hatches of a smaller kind are distinguished by the name of scuttles” 2.
And on a ship, butt has the same general meaning of ‘end’ we all use it for—whether it be the wider ‘end’ of plank of wood, the fat ‘end’ of a rifle or the plump ‘end’ of a human. By the way, some people think butt is short for buttocks, but that’s not exactly correct. The suffix -ock is an Old Saxon way of making words diminutive—similar to how a hillock is a ‘small hill’ or bullock is a ‘young or castrated bull’. So two buttocks make up one butt.
But more importantly to the term at hand, butt is also an old unit of measurement for wine casks. It equals 4 barrels, 2 hogsheads or 126 gallons 3. If we use the term a bit more loosely, it could just mean ‘cask’ or ‘container’. This use of the term butt comes from the Latin buttis—which is also where we get the word bottle.
By the way, have you ever wondered why butchers call the shoulder of a pig the Boston butt? Its because pork shoulders in America were often shipped around the country from New England butchers. And they were stored in a butt. But like…a wooden butt. Hence, Boston butt.
So What’s the Scuttlebutt?
When you put scuttle and butt together you end up with ‘a hatched cask used for holding drinking water’. The scuttlebutt was typically placed at the poop deck of the ship for general use by crew members to gather and gossip around. And that’s where it took on its euphemistic meaning. It’s the sailor’s equivalent to water cooler talk.
By the way, poop deck has nothing to do with human waste. Poop comes from the Latin, puppis meaning ‘ship’, particularly the back or ‘stern’. The poop deck is the highest deck of the ship, typically at the stern.
All of this is to say that regardless of what scuttlebutt actually means, if your dog is scooting its bottom across your floors, you should look into an ointment or cream for that. Neglecting it will only lead to greater issues down the road.
- Smyth, William Henry | The Sailor’s Word-Book | 1867
- ibid
- Capacity and Volume |Convert-Me.com