The decree was passed in 1983 in an effort to increase state revenue. Some people were alarmed to hear about the public hearing on a new departure tax. WHY IS THE DEPARTMENT HOLDING A HEARING ON THE TAX AT THIS TIME? The department confirmed it has no plans to collect a departure tax, with the public hearing it called via a questionnaire only a "process required by law" to evaluate regulations. Given this backdrop, the Revenue Department sidestepped concerns last week that it is considering a new departure tax on outbound travellers, based on a 40-year-old "emergency decree". Mr Charoen believes a 1,000-baht departure tax is too expensive amid current economic conditions. (Photo: Wichan Charoenkiatpakul)Īs the general election draws near, implementing collection of a new tax is an extremely sensitive issue and almost unheard of as a political tactic. These desertions are not caused by discontentment on the ship, but as far as can be learned via “scuttle butt,” by lack of consideration for this class of vessel in the Department, and the idea of completing a four-year cruise on this Station, everyone believing that after two years they should be sent to duty in the United States, their home country, as the European navies do.Īnd this explanation isn’t just scuttlebutt it’s documented.Travellers walk along the departures hall of Suvarnabhumi airport. Extra editions of the “Scuttle Butt News” were published at frequent intervals, and each number contained the latest dope as to our future movements.Īnd by 1913 we start to see scuttlebutt used as a noun. It’s unclear whether “Scuttle Butt News” was an actual publication, or just a nickname for rumor:Īt each meal, and when groups gathered together in their part of the ship for a talkfest, speculation was rife as to where we were going and why. Press stories and scuttle butt rumors put the Buffalo in the society class by stating a fair young demoiselle of the Hawaiian group secreted herself in the intricacies of the transport’s lower decks and rode undisturbed into San Francisco.Īnd there is this from William Richmond’s 1912 Nine Months on a Cruise. The rumor committee, otherwise known as the “Scuttle-butt Navigators,” to which every man on board was elected as a life member the moment he promulgated a rumor, was soon actively engaged, and it was definitely settled the Yankee was to become the flagship of the whole fleet, our captain made lord high admiral, and the whole Spanish nation swept off the face of the globe in about thirteen and a half seconds by the chronometer.Īnd in 1910 we get this from the Our Navy newspaper:
From an account published by Henry Harrison Lewis from sailors aboard a US Navy vessel during the Spanish-American War of 1898: In the transition from cask to rumor, we see the word first used as an adjective. It is in the US Navy that we see scuttlebutt shift from a jargon term for a physical object to the slang sense of gossip and rumor. There is no part of a frigate where you will see more going and coming of strangers, and overhear more greetings and gossipings of acquaintances, than in the immediate vicinity of the scuttle-butt, just forward of the main-hatch- way, on the gun-deck.īut as steam replaced sails and pipes replaced wooden casks, the need for literal scuttlebutts on-board ship faded, but the word hung on in reference to the conversations and rumors that had once taken took place there.
(That analogy is perhaps a bit dated now, though.) This practice is referred to in Herman Melville’s 1850 novel White-Jacket, which is based on his time aboard the frigate USS United States from 1843–44. Naturally, sailors would gather around the scuttlebutt and talk, much as twentieth-century office workers would gather around the watercooler. Therefore, a scuttlebutt is a water cask with a hole punched in it from which water can be drawn. A scuttle is a hole, and a butt is a barrel or cask.
The word arises in nautical jargon of the days of sail where a scuttlebutt was literally a cask containing drinking water for those on-board ship. Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip and rumor.
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