Take the con.

July 5, 2007 by Josh | 2 comments

I’m in the middle of reading The Mote in God’s Eye, a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A lot of the action takes place abord the ship MacArthur. I’m around page 100 at this point, and three or four times, I’ve seen the phrase “take the con”, usually spoken by the Captain to one of his subordinates. It was clear that he was saying “take over control of the ship”, but I was curious about the usage of the word con. I thought that it was perhaps an shortened form of control; I was wrong.

Apparently, the verb con can mean, on top of its meaning in the sense of a “con artist,” to direct the steering of a ship. Furthermore, the word con can be a noun, meaning “the action or post of conning a ship.” The word is indeed a shortening of another word, but not control; instead, the word is a shortened version of the now-obsolete cond, ‘conduct, guide’, which comes from the Old French word conduire.

(All of the information in this entry is from Oxford Online Reference.)

  1. Nils’s avatar

    Nils on July 5, 2007 at 4:29 pm

    Now that’s interesting. I’ve heard that word plenty too, often in those submarine movies. Never knew this, though.

  2. Josh’s avatar

    Josh on July 9, 2007 at 6:28 pm

    I’m now tempted to watch Das Boot again and see if a similar phrase is used in German.