What an awful thing it would be to leave "yacht" behind for the use only of advertising copywriters. It's a good Dutch word still, and oughtn't be stabbed in the back by yachtsmen. It worked hard for years as the name of the most popular print magazine. You may yourself, in innocence and without sarcasm, have considered joining a yacht club. I know what a yacht is, and what it is not, and there is no change in language that I can see. A yacht is a sailboat that by nature exists beyond mere utility. It can be of any size or pocketbook. A trim Optimist pram, sailed with elan by an 11-year-old, can well be a proper yacht. You will know it immediately by the bounce of her pigtail. How is a yacht different from a sailboat? Well, it will have a bit of varnish. It may have a few fittings of bronze, just because it does. It will have lines that please the eye, lines such that the designer intended a yacht, don't you know, and not a railroad train. It will have a jaunty character, and wear its flags correct and its lines coiled, and its accoutrements will reveal a taste in matching style to substance. It ought to have some wood, but if it has stainless steel where wood once was that will conform in its context and the new material will be homage to the old. A yacht leaves nothing to chance or fad, and is beyond the influence of the moment or the impress of public opinion. It knows what it is and was and makes no apology. Slocum's Spray was not a yacht, and neither is a Gloucester schooner or a friendship sloop or a Chesapeake bugeye. They descend from working craft, and proudly know it. Neither is a Hanse or a Benneteau a yacht, any more than a Winnebago is a land yacht. These new wide bodied, twin-wheeled, plumb-bowed exemplars of the ordinary, in their deference to production needs alleged as improvements, in their choice of gray and Formica as accents inspired by Early Holiday Inn, sacrifice the yachting aesthetic on the altar of the current They are Clorox bottles forever to be owned by the banks that financed them. They are the box that a yacht used to come in.
Bruce King designed yachts. Owners can call them that.
(Just kidding!) Wikipedia (If you consider it an "official" source (some like me always don't) says that a yacht is "likely to be at least 33 feet (10 m) in length and may have been judged to have good aesthetic qualities." I read in other sources that the length can be as short as 24 feet but no matter because we sailors don't refer to our sailboats as yachts but rather, when talking to other sailors, as sloops, ketches. yaws, racer/cruisers, catboats, even sailing prams and so on. When in conversation with "non-marine" oriented people, sometimes referred to as "land-lubbers", I never use the term yacht because it brings with it the unspoken statement that, "I'm wealthier then you are because I own a yacht. So there!" A silly notion to be sure but to those where I live, South Central PA (I drive 1.7 hours to my boat in Annapolis), where there are people both well above and below my means the term "yacht" sometimes brings to mind being as rich and as "yacht-clubish" as Thurston Howell III, played by Jim Backus on Gilligan's Island. As we all here on EYO know that couldn't be farther from the truth. All you have to do is to tell something like the story about how you removed the old head and waste tank from your "yacht" to convey that sailing isn't exclusively the sport of the wealthy or sometimes all fun and games. No, the term I use with my friends, people I just met and even family is that we own a "sailboat on the bay" and when they ask how big, and they always do, I say 32 feet which to them is impressive it's because it's bigger than their family car.
