Good catch on wrong word

In the last Esquire piece I wrote something to the effect of "... that doesn't jive with Obama's stance on ..."

In one comment section I was scanning, I was taken to task, as only those who delight in such corrections are wont to do (Well, at least he didn't do that horrible thing So-and-So did last week when he wrote . . .!).

But they were right and it's a common mistake.

The right term here is "jibe," not "jive." Jibe is a sailing term (To shift a fore-and-aft sail from one side of a vessel to the other while sailing) whose secondary verb use is "to correspond to."

Alas, jive refers only to the music style.

My bad, but nice to finally get it straight, so I'm grateful for the catch.

Comments

[Jeff Hasselberger]

To be even more specific, "jibe" means to shift a sail from one side of a vessel to the other while sailing downwind. Moving the sail from one side to the other while sailing upwind is called "tacking," which is also frequently used in analogy. Actually, I guess it's valid to say that you were on the wrong tack when you used "jive" instead of "jibe."