Back before I started this blog, I commented on my facebook page on the origins of the term SUPER BOWL, which seems to owe itself to some serendipity, connected to another instance of "super" in American lore, the SUPER BALL:
SUPER BOWL. The use of "bowl" to refer to a football game began when the Rose Bowl (stadium) opened in Pasadena in 1923. The stadium was modeled after the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CT, named for its shape. And "super"? Lamar Hunt, owner of the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs, first used the term during the 1966 AFL-NFL merger talks, saying it was likely in his head because his children had been playing with a Super Ball toy (i.e. a bouncy ball). In a July 25, 1966, letter, Hunt wrote, "I have kiddingly called it the 'Super Bowl,' which obviously can be improved upon."
Scholars of American history can comment on the history of Super Tuesday itself, which seems to date from 1984, an attempt to consolidate primaries into something that looks more like a national primary (as opposed to the limited state contests of Iowa and New Hampshire).
I'm wondering for now about why everything big or great is "super" in this country, from super-sized fast food (and Morgan Spurlock's documentary Supersize Me). It's every company's favorite adjective, too, from SuperShuttle to Supercuts to Super Nintendo.
The story is something as follows: Super is a pretty run-of-the-mill Latin adverb and preposition, meaning above, on top of, or beyond (and some other variations). It became common as a prefix, particularly in the sciences, and in many other words that made their way into English, like superintendent and superstructure (and lots and lots of others).
But it took until the 19th century before super started appearing on its own as an adjective in English. The Oxford English dictionary thinks that it came originally from SUPERFINE, a word used for manufactured goods meaning "extremely fine in quality," which then got extended to mean "Very good or pleasant, first-rathttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife, excellent."
This is still the sense that we observe in most colloquial uses, and most brandnames, but increasingly we're seeing it get used to refer to size or scope, which the OED doesn't pick up on but the American Dictionaries do (see Merriam-Webster's, e.g.)
Update: It may have been a SUPERMOON (when the moon is full during its closest approach to earth) that sunk the Titanic. It sounds like the conspiracy-est of conspiracy theories, but it was published in National Geographic.
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