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For those sailors back then their lives depended on good rope and good knots and knowing all of the different knots and when to use them, and the different sails, parts of the ship, and so on. So for them it was anything but minutiae.
I read the Horatio Hornblower series in paperback and hardback and had to guess and/or ignore the nautical terms that I didn't know, of which there were many. I'm looking forward to re-reading them on my ereader and being able to press on those words and get the definitions for them. (It's one of my favorite series.)
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