Today's Broadcast

Topic: Mariner

Not too long ago, we identified the late Woody Guthrie as a onetime merchant marine, a member of the United States Maritime Service. An alert listener who shared Guthrie's line of work corrected us gently. The proper title, he told us, is merchant mariner, not merchant marine.

A search backs up our usage: personnel of the merchant marine are known—individually or collectively—as merchant marine. But the people of the merchant marine do indeed refer to themselves as mariners, or merchant mariners, as distinguished from the marines, members of the U.S. Marine Corps.

A mariner is a seaman, a sailor, one who navigates or assists in navigating a ship.  What are the differences between the sailor, the seaman, and the mariner?

Not necessarily an awful lot. In its largest sense, seaman includes a ship's captain, but it normally refers to "sailors, those who take part in or understand the practical operation of a ship." Seaman also has a specific sense naming "an enlisted man in the navy or coast guard ranking above a seaman apprentice and below a petty officer"; this sense of seaman is sometimes used interchangeably with sailor.

Of course, sailor—unlike mariner, marine, and seaman—has another, less skills-oriented sense too, simply naming someone who travels by water.

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.