Leaving in the Lurch

The other day, I was promising not to leave a friend in the lurch when I noticed that I had no idea what a lurch was or how, exactly, you could be in one. I like to keep my promises nebulous.

I had always thought that leaving in the lurch had something to do with lurching back and forth, or that political favourite: a sickening lurch to the right.

However, sideways lurching is of nautical origin and has nothing to do with being in or out of the lurch. This latter lurch is helpfully defined in John Florio's 1598 Worlde of Words:

Marcio, a lurch or maiden set at any game.

A lurch is a score in a game, specifically it's a thrashing where one player doesn't win even a single point. If I beat you at tennis by a game to love that's a lurch. In fact, there are all sorts of terribly technical variants. In the game of cribbage a lurch involves scoring 61 before your opponent has scored 31. In whist it's something else, and in some sport it means scoring five before the other player scores one.

Anyway, lurch became a term for any uncomfortable pickle or scrape that you might find yourself in. And thus you can have a chap at your lurch, give a chap the lurch, or leave somebody in the lurch.

Now, if you're British, go and get yourself a copy of today's Times. If you turn to page 30 you'll see Matthew Parris writing about my book The Etymologicon, which is out in three week's time, but can, as you'll know, be pre-ordered here.

The Inky Fool prepares for a comeback

It's Not Tennis

As Wimbledon is upon us again, it is vital, dear reader, that you should point out to anyone who'll listen that they are not playing tennis. They are playing sphairistike.

Tennis is an old French game named after the command Tenez or Hold that you would shout when you served the ball. It's played in an enclosed court and is nowadays usually referred to as Real Tennis.

The game that they are playing at Wimbledon was invented by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield* in 1873, and he named his new sport Sphairistike, which is Ancient Greek for ball skill (sphere-tech).

The only reason that it isn't called the Wimbledon Sphairistike Championship is that nobody had the faintest idea how to pronounce sphairistike, and so they quickly gave up and started referring to it as Lawn Tennis.

Sphairistike is easy to pronounce, though. It rhymes with sticky.

So go forth, dear reader, and every time somebody mentions the tennis, tut and shake your head.

No, of sphairistike.

*Londoners can see his blue plaque just round the corner from Pimlico Tube Station.

N.B. I've mentioned this in a post last year. But if they're allowed to hold the same championship once a year, then I don't see why I can't write posts on the same subject.

Cricket

The language is peppered and salted with sporting terms. Whether somebody is fielding questions, playing on a sticky wicket or hitting something for six, he is playing cricket.

Slightly more obscure is the feat of H.H. Stephenson in 1858. Stephenson was a fast bowler who took 303 wickets over the course of his career. He once took three wickets with consecutive balls. Nobody had done this before. Everybody was terribly impressed with Stephenson: he had taken a trick of three wickets (trick as in card games). They felt Stephenson should have an award, but they didn't know what to award him. So they made him a special hat.

That's why it's a hat trick.

Incidentally, a google was originally a kind of cricket delivery, a forerunner of the googly.



P.S. I was at the cricket yesterday and it has been scandalously unreported in the papers that when Amir was facing his first delivery somebody with a very loud voice shouted "No ball".

P.P.S. I can't work out exactly what a google was. Anybody know?

Tennis, Eggs, Love and John Milton

When a cricketer fails to get a single run, a zero is written next to his name on the score sheet. This numeral of shame came to be referred to a duck's egg, and then simply a duck. That is why cricketers are out for a duck, and until they score that first run they are trying to break their duck.


I had always fondly believed the same to be true of love in tennis. I was told when I was a boy that love came from l'oeuf, which is French for the egg. I was, I fear, wrong. The idea of love as a vacuity comes not from Gallic ova, but from the idea of doing something purely for the love of it, or in other words for nothing.


This makes tennis a lot less fun than I thought. It would be more bearable if tennis weren't called tennis. You see tennis is the name of the old French game, real tennis as it's now called, and derives dully from tenez, meaning hold. Lawn tennis, the game that everybody knows now was invented by an Englishman called Major Walton Clopton Wingfield. He didn't call it tennis. He called it Sphairistikè, which was Ancient Greek for ball skill (as in sphere tech). 


But love and Greek are vanished. So I must console myself with the fact that John Milton was the first person to use the sporting sense of advantage:


For if the Scripture be for reformation, and antiquity to boot, it is but an advantage to the dozen, it is no winning cast.


Oh, and there's this Shakespearean gem, where Pericles, washed up on a beach, meets two fishermen and introduces himself to them as:


A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him:
He asks of you, that never used to beg.

Mrs M spots a typo

Weltmeisterschaft

Oh all right. As you are no doubt agonisingly aware, an emergency meeting of illiterate millionaires has been convened in South Africa.

The bountiful game is a subject of dispute amongst the literati. Albert Camus said "Everything I know about mortality I learnt from football". Camus played in goal and one of the most vivid moments in The Plague is the nostalgia felt for the prepestilential football matches:

...the once familiar smell of embrocation in the dressing-rooms, the stands crowded with people, the coloured shirts of the players against the tawny soil, the half-time lemons or bottled lemonade that titillated parched throats with a thousand refreshing pin-pricks.

Shakespeare mentions the game only once, with the insult "You base football player."

Football has donated many phrases to English. Some are old and venerable: kick off, play into touch, score an own goal and move the goal posts. Some are new and telling: roasting and handbags. But what, I hear American readers cry, is Dogberry talking about?

Soccer.

And the word soccer was invented by the decadent poet Ernest Dowson. Obviously, the word derives from a syllable of Association Football. But the first citation in the OED is Dowson writing in 1889 "I absolutely decline to see socca' matches."

Dowson also wrote:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.

Dowson contemplating injury time