I never knew and got curious and looked it up. I guess it makes more sense than slamming your testicals against the wall.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    14 hours ago

    You will hear Apollo astronauts occasionally say “all balls” or “five balls.” After performing maneuvers, they would check their trajectory by taking fixes on stars using the telescope/sextant, this data would be fed into the guidance computer, which would compute their deviation from their intended course. If they were perfectly on their intended course, it would display a variation of 00000. “All balls.” Perfectly accurate.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      13 hours ago

      Another fun one is that in the phrase “three sheets to the wind” Sheets do not refer to the sails as many believe, they actually refer to the ropes that tie down the sales. So you lose a sheet, the sail becomes less predictable. If you lost 3 sails I think you’d just be dead in the water most times, not stumbling about

      • kalpol@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Patrick O’Brian has a bunch of opinions about these. “The devil to pay” was spreading pitch on, or paying, the hard-to-reach seam between deck and hull called the devil. At loggerheads means fighting with the long poles with a hot iron ball on the end , or loggerheads, used to heat pitch.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    “Just under the wire” has a similar aviation lineage. According to my dad some WWII fighter planes had a wire attached across the throttle lever slot to mark the point that was considered “full throttle”. The wire was breakable, so a pilot in a desperate situation could push the throttle farther forward if necessary, but I think there was a danger of blowing up the engine. So being just under the wire meant not quite past that point.

  • Naich@lemmings.world
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    1 day ago

    Going “balls out” refers to governors on steam engines which used centrifugal force on a pair of balls to regulate the speed of the engine. At full speed the balls were out at the maximum.

  • Canadian_Cabinet @lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    Another fun phrase with similar etymology is “pulling out all the stops”. It comes from church organs, where the stops are all of the levers that can change the timbre

  • PlaidBaron@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Kind of like ‘having one’s balls in a vice’. It actually refers to the old days when ball bearings were made by hand. It was tedious work and the pressure to make ball bearings for the burgeoning industrial revolution was intense. They were cut out of metal and then polished smooth, secured in a vice. Hence, ‘having your balls in a vice’ meant being under intense pressure.

  • BlueLineBae@midwest.social
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    1 day ago

    So is the term “grounded” and I genuinely wonder what parents used to say to their misbehaved children before airplane terminology was commonplace.

  • hmonkey@lemy.lol
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    2 days ago

    Not to be confused of course with “balls deep”, which is exactly what it sounds like

    • Davel23@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      You may be thinking of “balls out” which refers to centrifugal regulators that are usually used on steam engines.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        14 hours ago

        As do many airplanes, in fact Cessna-style plunger throttle controls are relatively unusual.

        The knobs on airplane throttles or thrust levers are also seldom spherical; it has happened but most are cylindrical. There’s a whole section in FAR 23 that talks about how they have to be oriented in the cockpit, the shape and color of the knobs/handles etc. so pilots can tell them apart at a glance/by feel. For instance, when you first climb into a Cessna Skyhawk the position of the flap lever in front of the copilot’s left knee feels kind of strange, almost everything is conveniently placed for the pilot, but the flaps are way over there. law requires the flap control to be to the right of the cockpit centerline, the gear lever must be to the left, but a Skyhawk has fixed gear.

        You often hear steam engineers say “put the throttle on the ceiling” meaning apply full power. Diesel engineers will refer to “notch 8” as the highest power setting.

  • octopus_ink
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    2 days ago

    I guess it makes more sense than slamming your testicals against the wall.

    In a way relating to human anatomy that has caused me to remove this phrase from my usage in recent years (because I worried how others would take it) the balls=testicles actually always made sense to me, but I’m not going to explain it.

    However, now that I know what the most literal interpretation of the phrase actually is, I can feel safe using it again!