How are church buildings and governments like boats? Because of the words, of course!
Not all the words. But there are some unexpected crossovers. For example, take “nave.” It’s the main part of a church, where all the pews are (if there are pews, of course). It’s from the Latin “navis,” which means ship, and is also the source of the word “navy.” The architect Christopher Wren used the Latin word itself in 1669: “The Ailes, from whence arise Bows or Flying Buttresses to the Walls of the Navis”. “Nave” showed up after that in the 1673 book Observations Made in a Journey through Part of the Low-countries.
It’s not just English, either; the German word for that part of a church is “schiff,” which also means “ship.” And well before any of this, the ancient Greeks had a word for temple that was closely related to their word for ship.
Ships need somebody to steer them. The Latin word for steersman is “gubernāre” — that’s the source of “govern” and “government.” In fact in Old Occitan, “govern” means a ship’s rudder. And of course there’s the fairly common English phrase “the ship of state.”
There are a couple of theories about why all these things are based on the same words. One is visual; the design of most old church buildings could be imagined as looking like an upside-down ship. The other is figurative, as explained in an 1844 description of the word “government:” “A metaphor from mariners or pilots, that steer and govern the ship: translated thence, to signify the power and authority of church governors, spiritual pilots, steering the ship or ark of Christ’s Church.”
None of this, unfortunately, explains why prominent features of churches and ships — steeples and masts — have no linguistic connection whatsoever, even though you’d think they would.
