“You’re improvin’, Skipper,” he complimented me. I was so elated at winning his approval that I thought I would try my vocabulary out on my father. I went up on the poop deck where Father was sitting, smoking his pipe.
“Tell me to do something,” I invited him.
“Now, what are you up to?” he asked suspiciously.
“Just you tell me to do something as if I was a sailor in the fo’c’s’le,” I repeated.
“All right,” he replied, pleased at what appeared to be my desire to work. “You get a chip-hammer and chip the rust off the anchor chains. They got to be given a coat of red lead to keep them from rusting away.”
Then I let fly with my newly acquired sea language. I got as far as one-half minute of it when I felt myself going through space toward the cabin below with my father attached to my collar and the seat of my pants.
“Where in the so and so did you hear any such language as that?” he shouted.
“From you when you’re tacking ship and the wind won’t catch the sails,” I answered, wishing I had never learned them.
“I’ll be goddamned if you ever heard your father curse,” he yelled. “I’ll break your damned neck if I ever hear you curse again—do you hear?”
I heard him. The whole ship heard him with glee. Stitches said he embarrassed the flying fish! Father went on: