Editor's Corner

Good morning, friends. I hope that you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday. While I was out, I received an interesting link to a video from one of you, about jargon. We’ve talked about jargon many times before (and about trying not to use it), but this video had some fascinating tidbits I hadn’t heard before. Let’s look at one of the terms the presenter brings up: wheelhouse.

I remember the first time that I heard, “That’s not in my wheelhouse.” It was years ago here at work, and I remember it like yesterday, because I had no clue what the person was talking about and I couldn’t wait to go back to my desk and look it up. My coworker was using the more modern idiom referring to “area of interest or expertise.” But here are some older uses of the term, courtesy of Grammar Girl.

A wheelhouse is exactly what it sounds like: the little “house” on a ship where the captain stands, and where the ship’s wheel and other navigational equipment are located…

Although people have been steering ships for centuries, the term “wheelhouse” appeared for the first time in the early 1800s. In 1840, a traveler on a ship that burned and sank in Long Island Sound wrote a letter of complaint to Daniel Webster, then U.S. Secretary of State. The ship’s captain “seemed confused,” the traveler wrote. “He went into the wheel house, and that was the last I saw of him.”

And then the term wheelhouse takes a different turn.

For some reason, in the 1950s, this term was picked up by baseball announcers and reporters. They began to refer to a batter’s “wheelhouse,” by that meaning the area of the strike zone where a batter swings with the most power….

Grammar Girl goes on a bit about how this term, when applied to baseball, seems confusing. I found the following photo, and it seems to reflect the sailor’s wheel perfectly. Hit a ball in there and you’ll hear the crowd roar.

Either way, in the 1980s, the meaning of this term extended once again. It came to mean, and still means, an area or field in which a person excels….

Notice that you can use this phrase in one of two ways. You can say something “is your wheelhouse” or that something “is in your wheelhouse.” Either version is correct, but “in your wheelhouse” may be a little more common.

Enjoy your day!

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Knowledge Enablement

Pronouns: she/her | Call via Teams | jackhenry.com

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