Today’s “Word of Day” from our friends at Merriam Webster is “homily.” You’re thinking, “well of course he is going to mention this – it’s right up his wheelhouse.” Interesting expression that: wheelhouse. The word “wheelhouse” has gone from a nautical term, to a baseball term, to a term that describes a person’s area of expertise.

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. I rather think he stayed there until he suffocated.” Turns out he didn’t suffocate. He was one of only four people who escaped. All 136 other people on board were lost.

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. How did that linguistic leap occur? One theory, described in the Dickson Baseball Dictionary, is that batters “‘wheel’ at the ball, taking good, level ‘roundhouse’ swings.”

By 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. You could say that “blogging is my wheelhouse.”  Or perhaps, the generous among you might offer: “homilies are in his wheelhouse.”

By the way, “homily” comes from the Greek word homilos, meaning “crowd” or “assembly,” and travels through related Greek words homilein, “to address,” and homilia, “conversation, discourse.” Homilia eventually takes on the “usually short sermon” meaning in our modern homily.  The word passed from Anglo-French, losing the “h” along the way, but eventually adds the “he” back in and ends with a “y” for good measure.

Merriam Webster cautions not to confuse “homily” with “hominy” – something I don’t think we need worry about. But if it does happen we’ll just grit our teeth through the confusion.