The podictionary word for today is board:  Yesterday’s word arrive got me thinking about ships and the word board.  I wondered if boarding a plane arose because in days of old people had to walk on a board to get onto a ship.  Evidently not. 

According to the OED there seem to have been two different words board back in the mists of time before Old English had coalesced into a recognizable language—recognizable to us anyway.  One of these was more along the lines of border as in the edge, and seems to have been most closely related to ships, the edge you climb over to get onboard.  This is where starboard and overboard come from. 

The other board was a plank.  Since boats were often made with wood it’s easy to see how these two words grew together so that lexicographers have a hard time seeing where one word ends and the other begins.  So to board a ship was to climb over the edge, but earlier, to board a ship was to come up alongside it and for a while there board meant also to be close to.  So we have citations where to “board a woman” means to make advances. 

A boarding school is so named because they feed the students there as would also be the case for residents at a boarding house.  The board in this case is the table upon which the food is laid.  Similarly the board of directors are the group of people who sit around the boardroom table. 

The phrase “above board” meaning honest and legitimate comes to us from gambling jargon where fiddling around with the cards under the table was a likely activity if you were trying to cheat.  Board as an alternative word for table is more than 1000 years old.  To be “bored stiff” has nothing at all to do with lumber or ships and appears to have been a trendy word that appeared 200 years ago and caught on. 

For some reason boredom was a feeling that the users at that time associated with being French.  This seems to have faded by 1911 when Ambrose Bierce wrote that a bore was someone who talks when you wish him to listen.