About the name...

We've already had to explain it, ad nauseum, to friends and family, so I forgot that anyone just happening across the blog might require some additional information about the name of our boat, the Insegrevious. It seems unfair, really, since we didn't name her, but we're still stuck explaining it.

I had no idea what it meant when we first looked at the boat and didn't think to ask the previous owner, since he had also inherited the name at several owners removed from the original. So, like many of you, I turned to the Internet:

Insegrevious: (in-suh-GREE-vee-us), adj. having to do with apples and death.

Most people immediately think of Snow White but I'll remind you that she didn't actually technically die.

When I first looked the term up a few years ago, that was the only definition available. I run a search today, and I find half a dozen different mentions of the word, none of them in any agreement about who originally invented it or when. All I can say, for those of you laboring under the misapprehension that it was coined by a talk show host in the mid-eighties sometime, is that I have it printed right here on an FCC ship's station license from 1978, and a commissioning ceremony invitation from Ken Duckworth, the original plank holder dated November 8, 1977. In one particularly bizarre coincidence, our friend Matt told us that his father used to use the word when he was a child and was convinced that he had originally made it up. Popular phonetic combination, apparently. There are a variety of spellings, and the most popular alternative, even to the extent of appearing in places on some official documentation that we have, seems to be "Insegrievious." I don't know who mis-spelled it where first, but we stick with what's actually on the transom, even if someone accidentally left out an "I."

It turns out that I still pronounce it wrong about half the time, inserting an extra long e into the end. I'm not sure it matters, no one understands what you've said the first time you tell them the name anyway. I dread radio calls, which inevitably result in a response of: "Uh... Vessel calling... uh...." I'm sure that I mis-spell it phonetically half the time when I'm asked to repeat, but on the other hand, we never get lost in the crowd of "Wind_" or "Sea _" names which all blur together out there.

Despite all this, I kind of like the name. It's a sure fire conversation starter when we're pulling into a marina or going through the locks, and it's original equipment. I hate breaking tradition, and this is the name the boat was launched with an it seems fit to keep it as long as she's afloat.

For a long time, Mandy loathed the name and insisted repeatedly that she was going to change it, but she never got around to it and now it seems to have grown on her as well. So Insegrevious she shall be.