Joel of Far Outliers wrote me as follows:
The huge memorial for the Lahaina, Maui, wildfire yesterday included a massive “paddle-out”! Are you familiar with the term? Surfer Today has an explanation.
The article, by Luís MP, begins:
The paddle-out is a spiritual symbol of surf culture. It’s a traditional Hawaiian tribute to the life and legacy of people who passed away.
In most cases, the paddle-out is a floating memorial held in the ocean, a few yards from the shore, where surfers and other water sports participants honor someone they cherished. Paddlers often carry flowers and Hawaiian leis on top of their boards and in their teeth to the place where they will celebrate someone’s life. As they arrive at the selected location, surfers join hands, form a human circle, say a few words, chant, and splash the water.
What I liked about the article is that it gently but firmly debunks the idea that it has to do with “pre-historical Polynesian rituals”:
Most historians believe the paddle-out was born in the Hawaiian islands, but only in the 20th century when the Waikiki beach boys introduced it in Oahu. The earliest reports of a paddle-out date back to the 1920s.
Legendary surfing pioneer Wally Froiseth once said he participated in his first paddle-out in 1926 when he was just a six-year-old kid. “I don’t know of any place that did it before Waikiki,” Froiseth told the New York Times in 2010.
Well done, Luís MP! As Joel points out, it’s not in the OED yet, but Wiktionary has an entry for it.
Poor, lonely post. I’ll do my usual trick and say that I find three farms in Norway named Frøyset, all of them along the western coast. The name is transparently a compound Freyr “Norse god” + setr “dwelling”. Names ending in -set are generally dated to the Viking Age — and with that first element it couldn’t be any younger anyway.
Huh, this phrase seems to be orthogonal to the Sublime song (which seems to use the phrase compositionally), which will now be stuck in my head for the next week or so.