Sound (solid, reliable)

May 12th, 2011 by admin

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Posted in columns, May 2011 | 3 comments

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3 comments on this post.

  1. Elizabeth Lightwood:

    November 25th, 2010 at 10:20 pm

    The Times is out of joint, perhaps?

  2. Dan S.:

    June 15th, 2011 at 11:29 am

    Today, the depth of water can be measured with sound, using sonar. I had assumed that “sounding” referred to a low-tech version of this – making some kind of noise in the water and listening carefully to the echoes, in order to get an indication of where the bottom was. I guess not.

  3. Gavin Pate:

    March 30th, 2016 at 6:18 pm

    Dan S: There’s a phrase ‘swinging the lead’ (as in metal). It means to skive, or ignore a task at hand and refers to sailors shirking the task of sounding the ocean floor with lead weights on rope. Primitive sonar indeed.

    As for sound itself I come from a place where it has colloquial meaning. Sound is chirped by many a Mancunian (Manchester, UK) to mean someone of good character, by way of reassurance, or generally being a bit chuffed with what’s going down.

    And a more gentile expression in the UK is to be ‘sound as a pound (stirling) which I suppose now harks back to the sounding of currency cited in this article.

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