What Is The Origin Of (224)?…
Fathom out
To fathom something out is to deduce something or work something out. Often it is an involved process, involving the assimilation and sifting through of information from disparate sources. It can be a drawn-out process but suddenly the light dawns on you. You have fathomed something out.
As a unit of measure a fathom is a source of mystery to me. As a confirmed landlubber I hear nautical types talking glibly of fathoms and I haven’t a clue how long it is. It comes from the Old English word fæðm and dates from around the beginning of the 9th century. Principally, it was used to describe an embrace and, by extension (ahem), the length of the outstretched arms. In crude terms, a fathom became the length from finger tip to finger tip of two outstretched arms.
The problem, of course, with a rule of thumb measurement like this is that not everyone’s arms are the same length. The variances that deviations of physique could bring to determining the length of a fathom led to inconsistencies. In 1728 Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopaedia noted that “there are three kinds of Fathoms. The first, which is that of Men of War, contains six feet; The middling, or that of Merchant Ships, five Feet, and a half; and the small one, used in Flyts, Flyboats, and other Fishing-vessels, only Five feet.” Whether this relected the differences of stature in the matelots who sailed these different boats, I know not.
In an effort to standardise the measurement, the British Admiralty decreed that a fathom was the equivalent of a thousandth of a nautical mile, making it 1.85 metres or about 6feet one inch. Recognising the confusion that relying on fathoms could cause, nautical charts used feet to denote depths of less than 30 feet and fathoms for deeper waters. Perhaps they had fathomed out that the need for precision only pertained in shallower waters.
From the 14th century onwards, the verb fathom was used to describe the act of encircling someone or thing with your arms and so, if you were embracing someone, you were fathoming them. And by the 16th century fathoming out was a phrase used to measure something by embracing it with your arms. Describing the attempt of seven men to measure some large trees by putting their arms around them, Richard Eden wrote in The Decades of the Newe Worlde, in 1555; “with theyr armes stretched further were scarsely able too fathame aboute.”
It took no great leap of imagination to use the phrase in a figurative sense. After all, in order to understand something you needed to get your arms around all the information at your disposal. So, in 1625, in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, don’t we all need that, a comedy by Philip Massinger, we find; “The Statesman beleeues he fathomes/ the counsels of all Kingdomes on the earth.”
Fathoming out was used around the same time to describe a method deployed by sailors to determine how close they were to the bottom of the sea. In Sir William Brereton’s Travels in Holland from 1634 we find this passage; “fathoming the depth of the water over against the Brill, we found it there…that we had not above two feet more water than the ship drew.”
But for landlubbers, Massinger’s figurative usage won out.
