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American Sports and Were All Balls Made from Pigskins

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It’s been a while since we posted something on sports, despite the clamoring of our many readers. When I meet people on the street, in the diner, on the subway, or in a hansom cab, they often recognize me from the blog, and after soliciting my investment in their creative livelihood or some sure deal they’ve hit upon, they ask me when Lars or I will compose another fun feature about the fascinating world of sports.

Eager readers, today’s your day. On this very screen, I intend to answer your burning queries on the topic of Amercian sports. Who’s Connor Bedard, you ask? What’s jazz got to do with Utah? Is Ty Cobb really the most hated man in baseball? Please. Let’s take up the serious questions, shall we?

What’s the oldest organized sport made in America? That would be Lacrosse, which Iroquois were seen playing by French missionaries in the 1600s. Players would pass a deer-skinned ball with sticks, some of which had deer-gut for netting. This game may be almost a thousand years old. It was organized as a sport in the 17th century.

Asking for the oldest organized sport puts certain parameters on the question. If we backed off the idea of organization and asked what the oldest sport made in America is, that would be surfing. Though Captain James Cook first brought the idea of wave riding to the English-speaking world in 1778 when he saw Tahitian surfers, Polynesians had been surfing for centuries then. With Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 and statehood in 1959, Hawaii’s history is grafted into America’s history, making surfing a old American sport. (Is that a stretch? I don’t know. Let’s move on.)

Football has roots in the Roman Empire, which should be enough of an explanation for why men would be thinking about it daily, but what we call football in the States was refined in England and civilized by American patriots. Football has been a word to describe kicking around a bloated pig’s bladder since the 14th century. The first college football game was between Princeton and Rutgers in November 1869. They first played on Rutgers’s field in New Brunswick, New Jersey and the game was a lot like soccer. A few days later, they played at Princeton by Princeton’s rules. That set a trend until 1876 when Walter Camp, a Yale man, would begin to revise the game into one we would recognize today.

The word pigskin was used to name leather made from a pig’s hide by 1855, according to records, and was slang for “a saddle.” By 1894, it became slang for “a football” too.

To close out, let me point you to Ted Kluck’s article on Sports Illustrated closing its doors for good.

It’s been years since I’ve received Sports Illustrated, and I kind of put it away, emotionally, when I started writing for its competitor, ESPN the Magazine, in the early 2000s. Both magazines really haven’t been any good for a decade, with most of SI’s online “stories” reading like long tweets. 

Photo by Rob Worsnop/Flickr

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

The Office Above the Man, Justice, and Gingerbread

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I was thinking about the Roman Republic and Empire lately, and, no, it wasn’t a leftover from the Tik-Tok curiosity the other week. It was for my job, working on a humanities course. The text described how Romans formed their government initially with two political bodies, one restricted to families with old Roman blood, the other for plebians. The plebians pushed for political opportunity and got laws in place that allowed them to stand for election to important offices. This was an important shift from appointing a man of good standing from within the ruling class to establishing an office with legal responsibilities for anyone who holds it. It elevated the law above the man.

Liberty within the law is an important democratic principle. If a governor is just the man in power, he rules in his own interest, and if he’s wise, he will build up the whole region, but if he’s interested only in his own leisure, he will consume what he can for as long as he can at the expense of the people. But if the governor is an office with legal responsibilities and accountabilities, then whoever is put in the office has a public role to fulfill. He is a public servant.

This idea is being threatened by those who wish to redefine us into categories with rights and privileges inherent to those categories. They are working on us to view each other as types, some with innate goodness, some with innate justification, and some with innate wickedness who can do no good apart from submission. It undermines our liberty within the law and argues for those with the right blood lines to take control.

On this subject, I heard a good conversation this week on Cairn University’s defragmenting podcast with the author of Reforming Criminal Justice. Attorney Matthew T. Martens explains how politics has divided terms and concepts incorrectly, and how justice is a matter of Christian love. As host Dr. Keith Plummer puts it, there’s something in this book to ruffle everyone’s feathers, but it sounds like a well-composed argument for respecting our fellow citizens within the responsibilities of the law. Look into the book here.

What else do we have today?

Farming: Here’s an outside list I think you’ll find interesting: 22 Books about Farming, Food and Agricultural Innovations

Ministry: The Gospel Coalition 2023 Book Awards has some good titles, including an encouraging book on “’dechurching,’ why they’re leaving, and how we might thoughtfully engage them.” The media paints its own picture of people leaving the church; the truth is far more complicated and hopeful.

For comparison, look over the 2023 books selected by For the Church.

Gingerbread: The OED offers an interesting etymology of the word “gingerbread,” which is a seasonal food I enjoy year-round.

  • In the 13th century, gingerbread was preserved ginger, spelled as “gingebrad” or “gynbred.”
  • By 1450, the word was recorded as meaning the “cake, pudding, or biscuit” we know of today, though ginger isn’t a key ingredient, if included at all.
  • In the 17th century, it began to be used as slang for money. “Without commission: why, it would never grieve me, If I had got this Ginger-bread” (1625).
  • There’s also an obsolete use from 1664 meaning “superficially attractive,” whether that’s a person, word, or action.

Photo: Socks the Cat Standing Next to the Gingerbread Replica of the White House: 12/05/1993 (The U.S. National Archives, Public Domain)

Authors, Blogs, Socials, The Press

Old Words May Help Us Understand a Minnesota Bridge

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D’you mind if I share some things I read in the S pages of a massive Webster’s Second International? Thanks. You’re a peach.

Obsolete meanings of common words

Sorry is used as a noun in Scottish and some English dialects to mean “sorrow.” It was also once used as “to grieve.” And sorry grace was once a phrase meaning “bad luck” or “ill fortune.”

Sorrow once had a subtle use of causing actual damage, not just emotional stress.

Sore as an adjective once had a sense of criminal or wrong. As a noun, it once was used to mean disease, affliction, pain, or grief. As a verb, it used to mean “to wound.”

Sound was once used in the sense of understanding or relevance, as in, the speech had no sound for me.

Word combos

Also, on these pages are lists of combinations, like these archaic ones for sore: sore-beset, sore-dreaded, sore-taxed, sore-vexed, and sore-won.

These for sorrow are not marked archaic but have an unfamiliar sound to me: sorrow-blinded, sorrow-bound, sorrow-closed, sorrow-seasoned, sorrow-shot, and sorrow-streaming.

For soul, there’s a long list, including soul-benumbed, soul-blind, soul-boiling, soul-cloying, soul-fatting, soul-gnawing, and soul-thralling.

The Internet doesn’t have natural discoverability like this old dictionary. We could lose a lot of knowledge by limiting our systems to giving us only the answers to the questions we’ve asked, because if we ask what else we might want to know, the Internet just asks us what else we want to know.

Now that I’ve played the philologist for a minute, what else do we have?

More Words: Here are a couple videos on old words that should be brought back.

Journalism: There’s a pedestrian bridge crossing I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport that connects Bloomington to Richfield. Tyler Vigen wanted to know why it was built. Some of the readers of this very blog may be asking the same question, so Vigen did the research and has given us a full report (with excessive in-text notes).

Authors: C.S. Lewis versus T.S. Eliot with sharpened opinions

Naturalism: Does unnatural behavior exist? Is it true that “whatever is possible is by definition also natural”?

Photo: The sign on the old hotel by the tracks, Gulpwater, Wyoming. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Reading

Let’s Just Say I Know What I Know, Midwestern History, And Truthful Jokes

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It’s easy to overgeneralize, and when someone is battle-scarred, he may overgeneralize combatively.

I worked at a men’s conference in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, several years ago, during which a speaker made some mildly controversial points in an aggressive manner. I think this man felt he was under attack because he lacked support for his work. He probably had to argue for his point of view, if not the reality of his experience (it was on the fringe). “Nobody knows what’s happening,” he’d say. “Why doesn’t anyone see this?” he might ask. And at least one time, that question would have been answered with the fact that many of those in the room knew saw what he saw. We agreed. We didn’t need to be persuaded, and we weren’t fighting him on that point.

Too many of us are willing to say no one is talking about something important, when the truth is we only know something of what’s being discussed in our small circle, including the limited amount of news we can consume. The noise or silence on select social media can convince us that everyone is or isn’t talking about something.

The solution, of course, is humility. We know what we know, and even that could be wrong. We walk on to the best of our knowledge coram Deo.

Midwesterners Unite: A review of a new history of the American Midwest. “In contrast to prevailing clichés and the modern platitudes about backwardness, sterility, racial injustice, and oppression, an in-depth look at the history of the American Midwest reveals a land of democratic vigor, cultural strength, racial and gender progress, and civic energy — a Good Country, a place lost to the mists of time by chronic neglect but one well worth recovering, for the sake of both the accuracy of our history and our own well-being.”

Reading: Contrasting styles, subjects, and tones can act as palate cleansers between books. “They have to be short, they have to be relatively undemanding, and if it’s a re-read, so much the better.”

Satire: The head of the Babylon Bee talks about writing jokes that smack of the truth and the blowback his company has received from media outlets. “The absurd has become sacred only because it hasn’t been sufficiently mocked.”

English-American-Scottish Words: George Grant has an audio piece on the clash of words between the English speakers of America, Britain, and Scotland.

Theater: “Excuse me, sir; are you with the show?”
“Well, let’s just say I’m not against it.”

Photo: Old gas station, Odebolt, Iowa. 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Music, Non-fiction

A Tall Anniversary, Beautiful Things, and Conversations

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Thursday was the anniversary of the completion of Paris’s iconic ironwork project, The Eiffel Tower, named for the owner of the company that proposed and assembled it by March 31, 1889. They were aiming to have it up for the 1889 World’s Fair to be part of the centennial gala of the French Revolution. Philadelphia held a similar one in 1876.

The architect proposed using large stone monumental pedestals at the base and glass halls on every level of the tower. It’s final, simplified design was constructed in 18,000 parts in Eiffel’s factory about three miles away. The measured every piece carefully and mathematically configured the lattice work to minimize wind resistance. Two and half million rivets hold together the 1083-foot tower. 

Viewing the construction for a few weeks before completion, journalist Emile Goudeau wrote, “One could have taken them for blacksmiths contentedly beating out a rhythm on an anvil in some village forge, except that these smiths were not striking up and down vertically, but horizontally, and as with each blow came a shower of sparks, these black figures, appearing larger than life against the background of the open sky, looked as if they were reaping lightning bolts in the clouds.”

More on the 1889 World’s Fair from Marc Maison.

Beauty: Where would we be without beauty? It enlivens the heart; we value it, even if the beautiful thing isn’t useful–putting aside the inherent beauty of some useful, well-designed things.

Symphony: Robert Reilly says, “There is a steadiness in Haydn’s music, a sense of normalcy. At the same time, it is filled with wonder at what is—at its goodness.” Haydn was told his sacred compositions were too cheerful; he replied that his heart leaped for joy at the thought of God. As an example, here’s a performance by the Chiara String Quartet of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ.”

Sounds: Cambridge’s word blog is talking about rustling and howling type words.

Isaac Adams: “The race conversation often feels like talking to each other at the Tower of Babel. We may be trying to build together, but we’re frustrated and speaking past one another.” Adams’s book, Talking About Race, intends to inspire healthy conversations on this subject and bring us together.

Gene Veith: The popular Lutheran blogger is moving to a subscription model at $5/month.

Photo by Karina lago on Unsplash

Writing

A Common Root Origin of Pray and Prey?

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Ever notice that some words with diverse meanings sound alike? There are called homophones and are the source of countless confusions and misspeakery. The curious may ask if two homophones have a common origin, if perhaps a single word split in the distance past to give us the two words we have now.

Something of an example of a single word would be content. When we say CON-tent, emphasizing the front of half of the word, we mean the reading material, images, videos, or objects that fill up a website, magazine, or other media container. What’s in a thing is its content. When we say con-TENT, we mean to be at peace with a situation. “Having the desires limited to that which one has; not disposed to repine or grumble.” That’s the definition from Webster’s New International (2nd ed., many years old), adding this Spencer quotation: “Content with any food that God doth send.”

This word is not actually a homophone. It’s the same word with two meanings, both from one Latin word continere, meaning “to hold together, enclose” or to contain. The content of this blog is the substance contained therein, and to be content with something is to contain one’s desires within the bounds of that thing. Your umbrella may be bent and a bit shabby, but you’re content with it because you don’t want a new one yet.

My old Webster’s makes a good point contrasting content and satisfy. You may be settled or undisturbed by what you have, even though all of your desires have not been met or satisfied. “When I was at home, I was in a better place; but travelers must be content,” Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It. The speaker could easily want more or different, but today he’ll remain as he is–not satisfied but content.

But I was talking about homophones, such as pray and prey.

Pray came into English in the 13th century as preien, shown in this old Anglican prayer, “Almyghti god, euerlastynge, we preien thee grant us to slaken the flawme of oure vicis, that grauntidist to seynt laurence thi martir to ouercome the brynnyng of his turmentis. Bi crist.” The word came through French from the Latin precari, meaning “ask earnestly, beg, entreat.” You can hear a close relationship to the word precarious, which we often use to mean “uncertain” or “doubtful.” It actually means “dependent on someone else,” which is rather close to what the prayerful saint intends.

Prey in Middle English was preie, essentially the same spelling as the word intended as “pray.” Searching old prayer books, I see this spelling used repeatedly, such as this line from a tract by John Wyclif, “Christene men preie wiþout cessynge.” So, speaking as a layman, a novice, and a non-scholar (despite what they constantly told me in high school), perhaps both pray and prey were spelled the same in 13th century English.

But prey, a hunted animal, does not have the same root as pray. It comes from another French word (also preie) from the Latin praeda. These two words were used to mean “plunder and the spoils of conquest” as well as the rabbit in the falcon’s eye. And the verb form, to prey upon, is derived from the same Latin root.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Writing

Words for the Flock

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We talked about the word egregious and its change in usage last week. It comes from the Latin ex grege, meaning “rising above the flock,” so its use as a word for excellent or extraordinary, which are not the same thing, makes sense. This word grex or gregis is Latin for “a flock” or “gathered into a flock” and has given us a, uh, small herd of words.

Gregarious derives from this word alone, no stir-ins, no additional flavors. We use it to describe someone who loves to be around other people. He enjoys running with the flock.

Segregate means to separate from the flock.

Aggregate means “to collect or unite as a mass or sum,” similar to congregate, which also means “to bring together.” Coleridge said, “cold congregates all bodies,” making them appear united when they are spiritually indifferent.

Allegory does not come to use from grex, but it does comes from the related Greek word agora. Agora means “assembly” or “place of assembly.” “To speak in an assembly” or “to speak publicly” is the Greek word agoreuein. If you add allos or “other” to that, you get “to speak other in an assembly.” Tell the truth but tell it slant. This is the root of the Greek word allegoria, “the description of one thing under the image of another.”

Yes, I see that hand! That’s a thoughtful question. Thank you.

As words are wont to do, our word flock comes from completely different root words. On the one hand, flock (from Middle English flokke and earlier from Old French and Latin) means “a lock of wool or hair.” It can describe cotton or woolen rejects used to stuff a bed. You can use it as a verb to mean “to stuff a bed with flock” or “to give something a fibrous appearance.” If you didn’t know, and I didn’t, you can flock almost anything and could have been doing this for a good long time, allowing for a now obsolete meaning of this verb, “to treat contemptuously.” Considering today’s high levels of vulgarity, I don’t recommend attempting to fit this into daily conversation.

On the other hand, flock (from Anglo-Saxon flocc, related to Old Norse flokkr) means “a group of people.” If you say flocks, you’re going to indicate a large number of people from several sizable groups. Etymonline appears to say this word sprang from the ground of its own will, because it isn’t found in other Germanic languages beyond the Middle Low German vlocke, meaning “crowd, flock (of sheep).”

Continue reading Words for the Flock →
Writing

Egregious Examples of Less than Excellent Exercises

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If you come across the word egregious this week, it is likely in a story about the New York governor’s exemplary leadership during the pandemic in which he scuttled seniors by sending the coronavirus into their nursing homes while reportedly making the medical officials in charge of them immune to liability charges. He has reportedly threatened state congressmen of his own party in order to silence their calls for accountability. By all accounts, this is excellent gubernatorial work.

But you see the irony I’m using here. I’ve said egregious as if it means excellent, because that’s exactly the usage the word once had. Egregious comes from Latin, originally meaning “distinguished or extraordinary.” The Online Etymology Dictionary says it came into English in the 1530s.

An old educational journal gives some examples of its use in this meaning. From Samuel Johnson’s The Life of Pope: “This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence.” Here Johnson is saying Pope has outdone himself in this essay on man. “The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse.”

In a poem for a newborn prince in 1705:

One, to Empire Born,
Egregious Prince, whose Manly Childhood shew’d
His mingled Parents, and portended Joy
Unspeakable;

Johnson’s use leans into the extraordinary side of the original meaning of egregious, not so much the excellent side. Perhaps it shows the path for the change of meaning, which the dictionary has occurring in the late 16th century.

First, we used it ironically: Should’ve seen the street preacher I just passed, an egregious communicator that, preaching the gospel of sausages in buns.

Then, we pushed the meaning into outrageous or extremely bad, like only a governor can do.

Isn’t it interesting that words can flip meaning like this?

Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Writing

What Is Meant by Branding a Product “Plantation”?

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When someone introduced food writer Osayi Endolyn to Plantation Pineapple Rum, she says she was immediately suspicious. Plantation was not a neutral word for her because her grandparents had fled from the Jim Crow South years ago. But the rum was good enough to put those thoughts aside for a while.

Later she asked a bartender for the name of the pineapple rum in her drink. The woman seemed embarrassed to admit it was Plantation Rum.

Why would anyone be embarrassed about a brand called plantation? What would a company mean by choosing that name? Bigelow sells a Plantation Mint tea and Charleston Tea Plantation sells a variety teas. Plantation Peanuts of Wakefield sells gourmet peanuts grown in Virginia. Carolina Plantation sells rice. Many recipes have plantation in their name, such as Plantation Skillet Cake and Auntie Crae’s Plantation Chews, so surely the word connotes an idea or mood the owners wish to convey to others. (This is has begun to change.)

Endolyn dug into the meaning of the rum brand by talking to its owners and learning a bit of French and Barbadian history that supported using the word plantation over the equivalent farmland. What would you expect from those words in food brands? Are they interchangeably applicable to rice, butter, peanuts, leaf tobacco, bread flour, and beef?

For a short time, you can listen to an episode of The Sporkful in which they ask about this idea to as many brand owners as will take their questions. Bigelow, for example, wouldn’t talk about it. But some people said the word calls back to an easier way of life. When you think of it that way, you may start to ask whether life was easier and for whom.

Religion, Writing

Just say what you mean!

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I’ve taken to meeting with a small group of Bible school students for lunch once a week. We talk about writing, and stories, and the Inklings, etc.

Two weeks ago I talked about the difficulty we all have in writing plainly.

I’m inclined to think that it’s evidence of original sin that writing plainly is so hard.

Objectively, what should be easier than writing down exactly what you mean? It’s your own meaning. Just put it in words.

But it turns out to be one of the hardest things in the world.

We write a sentence, or a story, or a book, and then we look at it. We say, “No, that wasn’t what I really meant. It’s not quite right.” So we change some words.

But that wasn’t quite what we really meant either.

And so we go through revision after revision, deleting and adding words, replacing words, altering sentence length, breaking up and combining paragraphs. Until we finally hammer out something that seems to say (kind of) what we want.

But even when it’s done – even after it’s published (if we’re so lucky) there’s a lingering doubt. “Was that really what I meant to say? Could I have said it better? How would Phil Wade have put it?”

I think the reason is original sin. We’re so perverted in our nature, so blind to our own hearts, that saying what we mean is nearly the hardest thing we can do. (C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces has this idea as a central theme.)

Ecclesiastes 7:29 says, “Lo, this only I have found, that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.”

I’m going to post this now, though I probably could have put it better.