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MarcE wrote: ↑August 9, 2022, 10:53 am I sailed on 8 freighters and would never refer to any of them as a she. Its a he. Definitely. Everything about a freighter is a he.
Now that beautiful cruise ship on the lakes is definitely a she.
Sorry, it makes me cringe everytime I see a freighter referred to as a she.

Nah bro. It's always been she. Maritime tradition.

Yeah, we know. Alot of things make you guys cringe here. But you're just gonna have to find a way to cope.

yes i sailed and im sure i called some Captains a lot worst than "eyeliner"

Thank you Jared.
And as for calling a captain captain eyeliner? Wow..um..ok.
Guess you have never sailed.

French has resolutely used masculine nouns in describing ships for well over a millennium. Le bateau = boat, le navire = ship, le vaisseau = vessel, le remorqueur = tugboat, le pétrolier = tanker, le paquebot = liner, and so forth. In English "ship" comes from the Germanic "schiff," which is a neuter noun. I don't know how non-native speakers can learn English as well as they do (I've had students from Sweden, Germany, Moldova, and elsewhere who speak better English than my quite a few of my American-born students) because it has to be an extremely difficult language to grasp, but at least English speakers do not have to deal with remembering the gender of nouns and their accompanying punctuation.

if the captain of a ship is a female to you refer to her as the "old man?" years ago in goderich a paterson vessel was sliding in along the dock, a local asked the deckhands on the dock who the captain was, their reply was "captain eyeliner" sure enough upon looking up the captain was a woman. to me this was a copliment, they could of said a lot worst!

Calling a ship by a feminine plural has been a tradition for ships since the 1600s. The Greeks and Roman's are believed to have used the feminine nouns when addressing vessels of note, and the French had revived it by the late middle ages. But it's the English language that solidified the use of "she" through the Old English to New English and became a established tradition of the Royal Navy by the late 1600s. Both the US and Canada being successor states of the British Empire transitioned these traditions to our own maritime industry from the get go. And I'm the opposite, almost every ship I see I refer to as she.

Germanic and Slavic are the opposite. Almost all of their naval vessels use the masculine pronoun of "he" and mix of both genders for their merchants. Bismarck, Tirpitz, Kirov, Kiev etc are referred to as he.

Everyone has their own opinion.....history has had vessels commonly called she

I sailed on 8 freighters and would never refer to any of them as a she. Its a he. Definitely. Everything about a freighter is a he.
Now that beautiful cruise ship on the lakes is definitely a she.
Sorry, it makes me cringe everytime I see a freighter referred to as a she.