WHY "SPEEDBOAT"...?

A few weeks ago, when I was on holiday, back in those long, hot days of summertime which are already fading fast as memories as the icy chill of autumn starts to bite, I found myself sitting upon a bench and looking out to sea whilst below me other, far more adventurous, holiday makers played in the water on their inflatables and what-not, and others zoomed around on their jet-skis and motor boats, with the peace and the water being rent asunder by the occasional speedboat running in, doing the boating equivalent of a handbrake turn, and zooming back out to sea again.

Sitting there, I had a thought.

It wasn't a particularly significant or deep thought, it was merely one of those things which occasionally strikes you and then nags away at you the more you come to think about it.

The thought was this: "Why do we call it a 'speedboat'...?"

The answer might seem obvious; It's a boat built for speed, but then, well, we don't call a fast car a 'speed car', do we? We might call a racing car a racing car because it's a car that competes in races, but a fast car is just another car when it overtakes you in the outside lane on a terrifyingly wet road surface in a thunderstorm.

But then, the words that we have chosen to splice together always seem to have been picked fairly arbitrarily by history, don't they...?

So, in reality, a 'speedboat' is really just a boat, albeit a boat that might move slightly faster across the surface of the water than some of the other boats.

But they have become, in recent years, one of those 'aspirational' things that the rich and the wealthy and the powerful (and those who perhaps just want to give the impression of being rich and wealthy and powerful) associate with being a visible demonstration of just how rich and wealthy and powerful they actually are, although, personally, I struggle to imagine any circumstances in which I would actually want or need a speedboat.

Then again, why ever did they think the ordinary people who wanted to play the game would want to win speedboats on the game show "Bullseye"...???