Recently over dinner someone said that something was not in someone else's wheelhouse. I hear the expression fairly often, and understand as meaning "within someone's competence" or "within someone's area of interest." This time, though, it occurred to me to ask, "What is a wheelhouse?" Nobody had an answer.
One obvious possibility was the structure that holds the wheel of a ship, and this is one of the OED's first definitions. Before checking with the OED, though, I had a look at Life on the Mississippi and found that Twain consistently uses "pilot house" for that structure.
The Internet says that the current usage comes from baseball: the area in which a batter prefers to hit the ball is his "wheelhouse." That I suppose derives from the term "wheel" as in "swing". I have seen Frank Howard quoted as asking "How are you going to wheel that timber tomorrow if you don't pound that beer tonight?"
Well, there’s this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.yourdictionary.com/wheelhouse
Pilothouse has been my understanding.