Your rudder is too small

Lexicon. From the movie Titanic:

β€œ(Captain Smith) figures anything big enough to sink the ship they’re going to see in time to turn. But the ship’s too big, with too small a rudder… it can’t corner worth shit. Everything he knows is wrong.”

Not so much a misquote, as a paraphrase. β€œYour rudder is too small,” means you don’t have enough resources for the task at hand. Thus:

β€œI really think I can learn general relativity from this Mandarin textbook in six weeks.”
”Your rudder is too small.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *