"World's largest medieval cog found off Copenhagen" proclaimed the headline, but at first I couldn't make any sense of it because I was thinking of a cog as a tiny wheel essential to keeping machinery going, which doesn't sound like something happening in medieval times, but then I clicked and found out quickly that a cog is (or was, I guess) a type of ship, in this case a 90-foot-long cargo ship of a type known as the "draft horses of maritime trade in medieval northern Europe," carrying hundreds of tons of cargo from Point A to Point B and beyond.
So not a tiny but essential bit in a larger machine but a massive, strong, and sturdy bit of an even larger machine. Built around 1410, the shipwreck also features a brick galley well equipped to provide hot meals for the crew and "the first archeological evidence of a cog castle ever found," and before you get all excited about floating castles, in maritime terms a castle is a covered platform where the hard-working crew could shelter from the weather. (And where else am I going to flaunt my new vocabulary if not here?)
Just yesterday I was complaining (to a retired colleague and a couple of cashiers at the grocery store who got drawn into the conversation) about being nothing more than a cog in a machine, a tiny (but essential!) part that struggles to keep spinning silently even when gunk gums up the works, but now I wonder whether I ought to think of myself as a different kind of cog--a massive workhorse that carries a lot of weight to connect distant points, well equipped to weather storms while providing food, shelter, and comfort for my crew.
Sure, maybe one day I'll flounder in one of those storms, but in the meantime I get to carry a castle. (No tiara, though. It's not that kind of castle.)
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