swan dive

We were walking past the Council-created swamp  (wetland if you prefer) and I commented that the ducks were as usual heads down tails up. My partner replied that it would be nice if they did something different. A swandive perhaps. We both considered the fact that we didn’t know what a swandive was, had never observed swans diving. 

 So after the walk it was back to the dictionaries for an explanation.  It turns out that the British talk about a swallow-dive with reference to the shape that a diver makes in the air, back arched, feet together and arms outstretched, before entering the water.  The resemblance to a swallow diving through the air is clear.

 Somehow when this word translated to America it became swandive.  But swans do not dive. They don’t even need to stand on their heads in the water as ducks do. They just put down their long necks and forage that way. The Americans were certainly not thinking lierally when they used swandive as the name of the dive that humans execute, but exactly what their thought processes were is not clear.  Possibly it was associated with the general idea that swans are graceful. One more adventurous suggestion is that there was a New York diver called Jamie Swan whose picture appeared in 1886 in Life magazine. 

 Swandive then extended its meaning in American English to cover plummeting movements in other contexts. A particular stock might swandive on the stock exchange. But this is from the image of the diver plummeting into the water rather than anything that a swan might do.