![]() ![]() They achieve this by pressing on the front of their board to dive followed by the rear to surface after the wave has passed over them. This refers to the motion surfers use to dive under waves with their boards. Daily DriverĪ daily driver is a new school surfboard shape that sits neatly between your shortboard and your groveller, allowing you to carry out high-performance surfing on waves in the 2ft to 4ft range. ![]() The bottom turn is the foundation of great surfing and is arguably the most important aspect of quality surfing. When a surfer turns at the bottom of the wave face to perform a surfing trick or manoeuvre. BombĪ large wave, you’ll often hear it used in phrases like ‘that wave looks like a bomb’ or ‘she caught an absolute bomb yesterday’. ![]() This is considered an advanced surfing manoeuvre. To ‘backdoor’ a barrel or tube requires you to enter it while it’s already breaking from the opposite side of the peak. You could be ‘amped’ to go surfing tomorrow. AmpedĪmped or being amped refers to a feeling of excitement and readiness for an upcoming surf session. Let’s look at the many ways surfer’s have taken the English language into their own hands to describe everything about surfing life in our surfing glossary. By the 1840s, stool pigeon had shifted from being a decoy to being an informer.1.38 Wipeout The definitive glossary of surfing terms It seems that this idea formed part of the genesis of stool pigeon, so you might explain the term as “a fool used as a decoy”, though with a nod to the literal sense of the word. The other half of the expression, pigeon, has been used in slang since at least the sixteenth century for a person who allows himself to be swindled, a simpleton or fool, a sucker. It was also a verb: stooling was decoying ducks or other birds by the use of stools. The use of stool in this sense is older than that of stool pigeon - the earliest reference in the OED is to the town records of Huntington, New York, in 1825: “No person shall be permitted to gun with macheanes or stools in said Town”. It seems pretty clear from all this that the Americans who started to employ stool for a decoy bird were using yet another version of this old word. The verb for this action evolved into our modern sense in phrases like to stall for time. At the end of the fifteenth century this began to be recorded as a bit of thieves’ jargon for a pickpocket’s accomplice, who acted as a decoy to distract the attention of the victim. Stale appears in English from the early fifteenth century by the end of the following century it was being used for a person who acted to entrap another.Īnother spelling was stall. The one to focus on is the archaic term stale, which probably comes from the French estale, applied to a pigeon (aha!) used to entice a hawk into a net. ![]() The phrase starts to make sense when you delve into the history of words for decoys, of which there are a surprising number. To add to my suspicions about this definition, it seems from the evidence that stool pigeon has always been used for a person, never for a hunter’s decoy. Why a pigeon? More importantly, why a stool? Presumably the reference is to a tree stump rather than the backless seat with short legs (though as the tree stump sense of the word is rather uncommon, it does make one wonder would a hunter actually carry a stool out into the field specifically for the purpose?). Most modern dictionaries say the phrase came from the practice in hunting of tying or nailing a dead pigeon to a stool to act as a decoy. In that sense, it’s not far from the French agent provocateur. Q From Phil Potter: I am interested in the historical origins of the phrase stool pigeon.Ī These days a stool pigeon is an informer, but when the phrase first appeared - in the US in the 1830s or thereabouts - it meant a person used as a decoy to entice criminals into a trap. ![]()
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