Made In America (54 page)

Even with Camp’s refinements American football remained violent and dangerous. In 1902 twelve American players died. In 1905 the number rose to seventy-one. To make matters worse, schools began to hire professional players. ‘One man played, under various pseudonyms, at nine schools over a period of thirteen years,’ Page Smith notes.
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Professional football grew up in mining and factory towns in the early 1900s, and the team names tended to reflect local industries, as with the
Pittsburgh Steelers
and
Green Bay [Meat] Packers.
Professional football was slow to establish itself. As late as 1925 the New York Giants franchise was purchased for just $500. Not until the 1950s and the age of television did
professional football attract a huge and devoted following.

Although football has spawned a vast internal vocabulary –
T-formation
(1931),
play-off
(1933),
handoff
and
quarterback sneak
(early 1940s), to name just four – surprisingly few football terms have entered mainstream English. Among the few: to
blindside, cheap shot, game plan,
and
jock
for an athlete (from
jockstrap
for protective wear, and ultimately from a sixteenth-century English slang term for the penis).
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At the time that football was rising to eminence in colleges, another perennially popular sport was taking shape. In the fall of 1891, a young Canadian named James Naismith had just joined the staff of the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was instructed to devise an indoor game that didn’t involve bodily contact, would not result in damage to the gym, and in which every player had a chance to get in on the action. The game he invented was basketball – or
basket ball
as it was called until about 1912. Naismith hung peach baskets at either end of the gym and used a soccer ball for play. The first game, in December 1891, involved two teams of nine men each and was not exactly a barn burner. The final score was 1-0.
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As an off-season recreation, basketball took off in a big way, largely because it was so cheap and easy to set up. Within three years, a company was producing balls specifically for the sport and many of the nuances of play had already evolved. For instance, in 1893 came the free throw –
or free trial for goal
as it was at first called. Five players to a side became standard in 1895, but the names of the positions – centre, two forwards and two guards – weren’t fixed until the 1920s. By 1907, basketball was being called
the cage game. Cager,
whose continued currency is very largely the result of its convenience to writers of headlines, is first attested in 1922 in a newspaper in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

Oddly, although peach baskets were soon replaced by nets, until 1912 it didn’t occur to anyone to cut a hole in the
bottom of them. Until then it was necessary for someone to climb a ladder and retrieve the ball after each score.

Scores remained low for years. During the first National Invitational Tournament at New York in 1934, New York University beat Notre Dame 25-18, and Westminster beat St John’s 37-33. Not until the evolution
of the jump shot
in the 1930s and
hook shot
in the 1940s and above all
the fast break
in the 1950s did the sport take on some real pace.

Many YMCA teams evolved into the first professional teams, notably the
Celtics,
who were formed in 1915 and came not from Boston but from New York. But financing was always a problem and teams often had to resort to desperate expedients to keep from going under. One early team, to secure sponsorship, called itself the
Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons.
It was named for a Fred Zollner who, as you will have guessed, manufactured pistons. Professional basketball didn’t really get going until the formation in 1949 of the National Basketball Association, created by the merger of two smaller leagues. Like football, professional basketball was essentially a child of television, and, like football, it has had surprisingly little influence on American English. In fact, if you discount occasional figurative applications for a few expressions like
slam dunk, air ball
and
full-court press,
it has had none at all.

Of rather more interest linguistically is one of the more ancient of popular pastimes: golf. The game and many of the terms associated with it are of Scottish origin, among them
bunker, tee, divot, niblick, duffer, links
and
golf
itself. The word, of uncertain origin though possibly from the Scottish dialect word
gowf,
meaning to strike or hit, was first recorded in 1457. Variant spellings suggest that until fairly recent times it was pronounced with the l silent.

Golf came to America surprisingly early. As far back as 1786, just ten years after the Declaration of Independence, Charleston had a place that styled itself a golf club, and
Savannah got one in 1795, though there is no evidence that golf was actually ever played at either. Certainly neither had anything remotely describable as a course. In any case, both were defunct by the second decade of the nineteenth century. The first real golf course in North America was that of the Royal Montreal Golf Club, formed in 1873. The first in the United States was the Foxburg Golf Club, in Pennsylvania, founded in 1887.

Though the game is Scottish, many of the terms are American, notably
par,
which dates from 1898.
Par
of course signifies the score a good player should make on a given hole. Before
par
became current the word used was
bogey,
an old Scottish word for a ghost or spirit. The notion was that each player was scoring against a hypothetical bogey man. However, in 1898, the rubber golf ball was invented and quickly displaced the old gutta-percha balls. (
Gutta-percha,
for the record, comes from a Malay word meaning ‘strip of cloth’.) Because the new balls travelled further, one less stroke was required on average on each hole.
Par
therefore came to signify the new notional number of strokes required, and bogey was preserved for the old number of strokes. Gradually as gutta-percha balls disappeared altogether,
bogey
came simply to mean one stroke over par.
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Birdie,
signifying one stroke under par, comes from a nineteenth-century American slang term meaning excellent. Both it and
eagle,
an Americanism meaning two strokes under par, became common in the 1920s.
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In the same decade golf became associated with two rather odd items of clothing. The first was
knickerbockers,
a nonce word coined by Washington Irving in 1809 for his
Knickerbocker’s History of New York
(which wasn’t actually called that; the formal title was
History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker
)
.
By means that escape rational explanation, the word attached itself first to women’s underwear (which are to this day called
knickers
almost every-
where in the English-speaking world but North America), and then, by a further dazzling flight, to the shortened trousers favoured by golfers in the 1920s, and whose continued existence appears to be the odd and, I would have thought, little encouraged quest of Mr Payne Stewart. Golf knickers further begat another short-lived item of apparel, the
plus fours,
so called because they were four inches longer than knickers.
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Finally, before we put the world of sports behind us, note should be taken of the recent controversy over the offensiveness of many team nicknames to American Indians. In 1992, a movement called the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media was formed, partly to protest against the use of nicknames like
Braves, Redskins,
and
Indians.
In the view of Clyde Bellecourt, director of the American Indian Movement, ‘calling the team the Washington Redskins is like calling them the Washington Negroes or the Washington Blackskins’.
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In defence of
Cleveland Indians,
it has been noted that the team name actually commemorates a Native American, Louis F. ‘Alex’ Sockalexis, a Penobscot Indian who had been one of the team’s star players in the 1890s and for whom the Cleveland Indians named themselves in 1914, the year after his death. But the argument doesn’t wash with some activists. As one put it, ‘In that case, they should call themselves the Cleveland Sockalexises.’

A few colleges and high schools have changed their team nicknames from
Mohawks
or
Hurons
to something more innocuous and less emotive, and one newspaper,
The Oregonian
of Portland, announced in 1992 that it would no longer publish Indian-related nicknames, explaining that they tended to ‘perpetuate stereotypes that damage the dignity and self-respect of many people in our society’.
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At the time of writing, however, no professional team was seriously contemplating a name change.

When, in about 1820, a Congressman named Felix Walker was accused of speaking drivel – which, evidently, he was – he replied that he was speaking to the people of Buncombe County, North Carolina, his district. Almost immediately his congressional colleagues began referring to any political claptrap as
speaking to Buncombe.
Soon the phrase had spread beyond Washington and was being abbreviated to
buncombe,
often re-spelled
bunkum,
and eventually was further contracted to
bunk. Debunk,
a back-formation, came later still, in 1927.
Bunkum
in turn begat
hokum
– a blend of
hocus
and
bunkum.
Thus with a single fatuous utterance the forgotten Felix Walker managed to inspire half a page of dictionary entries.
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In doing so, Walker touched on a central paradox of American political rhetoric – namely, that while politicians may mostly spout
hot
air (in its metaphorical sense an Americanism of the 1840s), they also constantly refresh the language.

A few American political terms have considerable venerability.
Caucus,
from an Algonquian word for
counsellor,
dates from the early seventeenth century, and as such is one of the oldest of surviving Americanisms.
Mugwump
(at first often spelled
mugquomp
), another Algonquianism, followed soon after, making its first recorded appearance in 1643. For two
hundred years it retained its original sense of a chief or leader before abruptly shifting in the 1880s to describe a political maverick. (The oft quoted definition is that a
mugwump
is someone who sits with his
mug
on one side of the fence and his
wump
on the other.)
Favourite son
was first used of Washington as far back as 1789 and
administration
was coined by him soon after.

But the golden age of American political terminology was the nineteenth century. Of the perhaps two hundred terms that gained some measure of currency in that tumultuous century, a good number were sufficiently useful to be still with us today, among them
spoils system, lobbyist, split ticket, party ticket, dyed-in-the-wool, office seeker, dark horse, lame duck, slate, standard-bearer, gag rule, straw vote, party machine, filibuster, slush fund, gubernatorial, junket
in the sense of a trip at government expense,
bandwagon
in the sense of a movement or fashion to climb aboard,
landslide
for a victory,
to dodge the issue, to electioneer, to campaign, to gerrymander, to be in cahoots with, to logroll, to stump, to run, to muckrake, to mend fences, to whitewash,
and
to keep the ball rolling
(so said because in the 1840 presidential campaign a ten-foot leather ball bearing that slogan was rolled from town to town in support of William Henry Harrison).
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One of the first of these terms to enter common parlance was
gerrymander.
Meaning to redraw electoral boundaries to favour a particular party, it dates from 1812 and was named for Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry (shortly to become Vice-President under James Madison), whose Jeffersonian party engaged in some audacious cartographic manipulations to preserve its grip on the state assembly. Noticing that one district in Essex County had a vaguely reptilian shape, the artist Gilbert Stuart sketched on a head and legs and called it a salamander. ‘No, a
gerrymander!’
cried an onlooker, and the term stuck. A small, overlooked aspect of the term is that we all mispronounce it. Gerry spoke his
name with the hard
g
of
Gertrude
rather than the soft
g
of
Gerald.
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In the following decade two other durable political terms arose, both in the New York state capital, Albany. One was
spoils system,
inspired by the expression ‘to the victor belong the spoils’, which has a nice classical ring to it but in fact was first uttered by an otherwise forgotten New York legislator named William E. Marcy.
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Also in Albany at about the same time arose the much-needed term
lobbyist
for someone who hung around the capitol lobby seeking favours of passing legislators. (They hung around the lobby because they weren’t allowed into the legislative chambers.)

Several other terms were borrowed from abroad. The custom of describing politicians as belonging to the
left, right
or
centre
of prevailing political sentiment came into American usage in about 1840 from Britain, though the British had in turn borrowed it from France, where it originated in 1789 as a by-product of the revolution. The terms reflect the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly, where it was customary for the more radical commoners to sit to the left of the President while the more conservative clergy and nobility filled the seats to the right. In neither Britain nor America did the terms reflect actual seating arrangements, but they proved convenient labels.
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