Chrysti The Wordsmith: Fly By the Seat of Your Pants

Greetings and welcome to Christie the wordsmith. If you can perform an unfamiliar task reasonably well without prior coaching. If you operate by intuition rather than by instruction people might say that you're able to fly by the seat of your pants. Now here's another common American English expression that defies any logic we might be able to press upon it. The backsides of dungarees do not commonly sprout wings and launch into the wild blue yonder to make sense of the phrase fly by the seat of your pants we turn to the parlance of American aviation. It was originally applied to early 20th century pilots who successfully operated airplanes without the aid of navigational instruments such as compass radio all to matter and the like. These intrepid aeronauts were said to fly by the seat of their pants. That is to navigate using all their senses sight hearing and the feel of the vibration of the plane through the pilot's seat or through the seat of the pants literally. Ought as this expression seems it's served American English speakers well since the 1930s the

decade of its first citation. You can read more about the history of this phrase in any cliche dictionary. Look for one on the reference shelves of your library or bookstore. Coming to you from Montana State University in Bozeman. I'm Christie the wordsmith. Thanks to Brody Kates studio engineer and Philip Gaines consulting editor guitarist Stuart Weber performs the theme music for this series with Dave or bores. CHRISTIE The wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry. Zoot web dot com.