Take the simplest of them. Take the Clove Hitch. Write a sentence in English which will explain (without a picture) how to cast a Clove Hitch. I do not think you will succeed.
Talking of this literary side of ropes, see how the rope has accumulated, like everything else, a vast army of technical terms, a whole regiment of words which are its family and of which it is very jealous. People who write of ropes are hardly able to keep off these words although they mean nothing to the reader and are but a darkening and a confusion. There is stranding and half-stranding and there is parcelling, serving and whipping, and crowning and all the rest of it. How came such words there? Who thought them to the point? On what possible metaphors were they founded? In nearly all other groups of technical words you can trace the origin, but here you cannot. Nor can you find the origin of the names for all the hundred things that are made of ropes. Why is a gasket called a gasket? Why is a grommet called a grommet? Why is a true lover's-knot called a true lover's-knot? or a tack a tack? Now and then there is a glimmering of sense. Halyard is obvious and sheet is explicable. Outhaul and downhaul might be Greek or German so plainly do they reveal their make-up. But what are you to make of bobstay, parrel, runner and shroud? Why are ratlines ratlines? What possible use could they be to a rat? They are no good for leaving a sinking ship, though excellent for running up out of the rising water. "Springs" I half understand, but whence in the name of Chelsea came "painter"? Reef points might pass. That is if you admit reef—which, I suppose, is the same as "reave" and "rove"—but, great heavens, where did they get "earrings"—and why do you "mouse" hooks, and what have cats to do with anchors?
A ship is a little world, a little universe, and it has a language of its own, which disdains the land and its reasons.
"ULTIMA RATIO"
I came out of the sea the other day into a little English harbour and landed there. After I had put away everything on board and left my boat in charge of the old man who looks after her in the tidal lock, I stood waiting outside the railway station till my train should come and take me home. And there it was that I saw a German gun.
They had put it up for a trophy. Never was a war with trophies so promiscuous! Never was a war with trophies so much of an anti-climax! The nearest thing to a real trophy which they have had since this war ended was the great pyramid of guns in the middle of the Champs Elysées, all heaped together pell-mell with the cock crowing on the top of them. But I never see a Bavarian or a Prussian gun stuck up mournfully in a little English town without thinking of the English and French guns which are knocking about somewhere among the German states. And what is more, I never see one without thinking how poor a trophy the modern gun makes; especially the German gun, the carriage of which always reminds me of rather heavy and bad agricultural machinery. I think of the trophies of old, of the fine bronze guns taken in the wars against the French, and of the flags in the churches, and especially that amazing ragged dusty double line of them in the Invalides in Paris, which looks down slantwise through a yellow window and sees, in its solemn gulf below, the huge marble sarcophagus of Napoleon.
However, there was the gun. And as the time of waiting for a train is the most empty time in the world (because you cannot limit it and you do not know whether it is long enough to start a geometrical problem or some other entertaining pastime), I filled it up by walking round that gun.