Why are so many terms nautical in origin? [closed]

Just speculating widely here.

Sailing was big in the 18C, you think the dot-com boom was big? That's nothing to the spice trade, Dutch east India company, Canada (and some other non-descript place just to the south). Since it boomed fairly quickly and under some sort of central control there was a standardization of terms. Carpentry or blacksmithing might need a lot of technical terms, but every village probably had it's own word for each tool while the navy training meant that sailing terms were standardized, at least in English.

There are a LOT of technical terms on a sailing boat, they look simple but they are insanely complex to operate and since the command protocol consists of shouting at people the terms have to be precise, definite and standard.

It was also the time of a great boost in literature and since sailing and maritime trade was the exciting big thing of the day it was a natural setting for your literary hero. There are probably lots of technical terms required to build a medieval cathedral, but there wasn't a big market for 13C romantic fiction about the workers.

ps. And of course sailors had contact with other countries, so a lot of foreign (especially Indian and Chinese) words would have been first encountered by sailors and then incorporated into their language and jargon.

England, the home of "English," is located on a small island. (Three other English speaking countries, the USA, Canada, and Australia, can be considered to be located on LARGE islands.)

To get from the island (Britain), to the rest of the world, it is necessary to travel by sea. This was particularly true in the 18th and 19th centuries (when much of our modern vocabulary was developed) before the age of air travel in the twentieth century.

Most of what the country was about was getting goods and people to and from the country BY SEA. If President Coolidge said, "The business of America is business," he might have said, "The business of England is shipping." Hence, "naval" and "nautical" issues were pre-eminent in the life of Britain (and to a slightly lesser extent in the other English-speaking countries), and that's why a lot of English vocabulary/expressions is connected to the sea.

Under the circumstances, sailing wasn't a "highly specialized profession." Instead, it was part of the "mainstream" (pun intended).