10. Your Favorite Sports and Their Word Histories

　　BACKGAMMON: back game

　　The beautifully inlaid 5,000-yeat-old backgammon board of Queen Shub-ad was found in her tomb during the excavation of the ancient capital of Babylonia, Ur of the Chaldees. Backgammon and its blood cousin, checkers, were known throughout the East thousands of years ago. From a date far back before the time of Christ comes a representation of a lion and an antelope at play over a draughts board. As a point of information, the lion is in the act of grabbing the stakes. Roughly speaking, the game of backgammon as we know it is usually dated form the 10th century, since the board was more or less standardized at that time. The word gamen in early English meant “game.” Hence backgammon really means “back game” because the pieces are often “sent back” to reenter the board.

　　BADMINTON: named for an estate

　　The Duke of Beaufort had a tidy bit of property ten miles in circumference in Gloucestershire, England. This estate of his, called Badminton, was apparently the scene of several innovations in English living in the late 19th century. A claret and soda drink was named badminton after it, but that has long since been forgotten. Everyone, however, knows of the game badminton, which was first played in England in 1873. The game itself was imported from India by the British.

　　BLINDFOLD: meant a blow

　　In the children’s game of blindman’s buff, one of the players is blindfolded, and this sounds as though a handerchief were folded around the victim’s eyes, but the word blindfold means nothing of the kind. The Middle English word blindfellen meant “strike blind,” and fellen meant “strike” but blindfelled the form of the past tense, was eventually altered to blindfold. And, by the way, the buff in blindman’s buff means a “blow” that was struck during the game.

　　BOWLING: kings forbade it

　　This game has a romantic history although the derivation of the word bowling is simple. It is originally from the Latin bulla, “bubble.” Bulla finally became “bowl” which, at first, meant either the ball itself or the active cast or delivery of the ball. Modern keglers may be interested to know that the complete equipment for playing their game was discovered by Sir Flinders Petrie, the British archaeologist, in an Egyptian tomb dating back to 5,200 B.C. And these same keglers may be surprised to learn that bowling was forbidden in England by Edward | | |, Richard||，and other monarchs because it was thought to be too harmless a sport and one that provided no training for war such as archery did. Henry V| | | also forbade bowling, but he had a fine alley laid out at Whitehall so that he might amuse himself between executions. But in spite of all this, the Dutch brought a variety of this game over and taught it to us on Bowling Green, those acres that lie in New York’s financial district.

　　]BRIDGE: first a man’s game

　　The earlier name for this was biritch. The game was enthusiastically taken up by the British in the lush 1880’s. Women were at first excluded and it was as much of a man’s game as poker, but the turn of the century changed that, and women’s clubs became more common than men’s. The story that card were invented to amuse a feeble-minded king seem not to be quite accurate. It is true, however, that the first record of playing cards in Europe appears in the household accounts of Charles VI in 1392 or 1393. But, since his mental illness didn’t appear until 1393, it would seem doubtful that the game of cards could suddenly be invented for his sake. Little is known of their actual beginning, although some writers say that a Chinese by the name of Seun-ho, who lived around 1120 A.D., devised the game for the amusement of his concubines. In Egypt, cards were connected with religious ideas. At the least, we know that by 1483 Europe took to playing cards with such a passion that the first sermon was preached against them by Saint Bernardion of Siena at Bologna, Italy. His congregation was so stirred that they rushed home and made a bonfire of every pack that they had. Germany was an early center of card manufacturing. These cards had images of bell, hearts, leaves, and acorns, representing the nobility, clergy, landowners, and laborers. The Spanish went in for swords, batons, cups, and money. Our own symbols came directly from the French, but the names are a mixture. The club is a translation of the Spanish basto, “baton,” but the figure is the French trefoil, that is, “three-leaved,” really a clover. Spade is from the Spanish espada, or “sward,” which comes ultimately from the Greek spathe which meant “wooden sword.” The French word carreau really means a pane of glass or a tile, but when they use it in cards it identifies what we call a diamond. The heart is simply a conventional drawing of the human heart. In card games the word discard is often used. An earlier spelling of this term was decard, from de, “away,” and card, “card,” which first meant to reject a card from your hand. Now discard is used in other ways than card playing.