blood sugar is our friend

[fox]

falling asleep at my desk, and freezing cold. eurgh. but, time to take my medicine, and enough dawdling about getting up to go get some tea (oh, i'll just do one more ______ -- an hour goes by), so up i get, hot tea, yogurt with which to take the medicine (raspberry today, a change of pace), and between the food and the hot drink and the actual movement of actual limbs, i no longer feel quite as ready to keel over.

so "keel" means "fall" -- but it must have a particular connotation that "fall" on its own doesn't have, or we wouldn't still use both words. and this verb "keel" must be related to the noun "keel", as in "keep an even keel" and "keel-haul" and "a keel and a hull and a deck and a sail, that's what a ship needs". i wonder what it is about the way we fall when we keel over that's associated with the keel on a ship. is keeling over, like, capsizing?

yes, this is precisely how i get.

Comments

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i think "keel" as "fall" is actually an abbreviation of "keel over", which is precisely what you'd expect given the noun form :)

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

no -- that's precisely my question. "keel over" means "fall over", but why? what is it about keeling over that has anything to do with the keel on a ship? etc., etc., see above.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

when a boat capsizes, the keel is then over the rest of the boat, rather than underneath where it is more typically found. i think it's the analogy with capsizing a boat that leads to the analogy with falling.

consider: one can "fall" over, down, or across, or just plain fall without additional preposition. but "keel down" and "keel across" don't have any meaning related to falling ("keel down" if anything reminds me of the motorcyclist phrase, "rubber side down").

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

so what you're saying, in short, is: yes.

:-)

right, see, here's the thing. we can fall down, etc., as you say. but we can fall over. or we can keel over. i maintain these have very slightly different meanings, or else one expression would have fallen out of use. i suggested in the first place that keel over=fall over might have something to do with capsizing. but what i'm also wondering is, what sort of falling over is more accurately described as "keeling over" than some other sort of vertical reversal (tipping over, tumbling over, going ass-over-teakettle, etc.).

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

well, yes :)

wrt slightly different meanings, i give you billy collins: I know there is no such thing as a synonym....but then again i think semantics are all always more or less fuzzy, and i can't say for sure you'll end up with a really good distinction between such a phrase and its friends and neighbors. i think "tipping" implies that the movement started at the top, that "tumbling" is more rounded and likely to include multiple iterations, and "ass over teakettle" is more suited to a victorian parlor than the docks and quaysides of "keel".

[fafou.livejournal.com]

going ass-over-teakettle

I have *never* heard this expression please explain.

[asphodeline.livejournal.com]

OK this is something of a guess but I've always thought of 'keel' over (rather than 'fall') as a slightly slower process, a sort of slow motion fall over rather as a boat would go.

[fafou.livejournal.com]

Yeah I agree with you here. When a boat capsizes it takes time for it's keel to be over the rest of the ship. So I can see the analogy here.

[datlowen.livejournal.com]

Quite honestly, I've always thought of "keeling over" as dying, not just falling, which is exactly what happens when your keel is over the rest of the boat--it's pretty much dead.

[fafou.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily, but then when keel over became an expression we didn't have the great shipbuilding techniques we have now (ya' know wide is better). I mean sunfish (a really small sailboat) can pretty much go upside down, but then right themselves, with little human involvement.