Super Bowls, Balls, Boles, and Bulls

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl, so of course I've been wondering not primarily about which team will win, but about the origin of the term itself. (See also my post on Super Tuesday from 2012). Why is the Super Bowl called the Super Bowl? It hearkens back to College Bowl games, and first and foremost the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The Rose Bowl's name and shape were inspired, in turn, by the very first bowl-shaped college stadium, the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CT.

But the association between bowls and balls comes not only from the shape of football stadiums in which oddly-shaped balls are tossed around. In fact, "bowl" and "ball" come from the same root.

Take bowling, for example. Bowling got its name from bowls, a 15th century game played with wooden balls; bowl was another word for ball and the verb "to bowl" was derived from the noun. Incidentally, this is the origin of the phrase "to bowl over," originally, to physically knock someone over with a ball. The word "bowl" for "ball" derives from the Old French "bole," (boule in modern French; even English speakers might enjoy buying bread whose shape is described using that word).

The french bole (or boule) derives in turn from the latin "bulla," "a round swelling or knob." Because the seals used to seal documents were (I suppose) round and knob like, a sealed document began to be called a "bulla" as well, whence the papal bull, an official communication by the pope.

Whether bull, bowl, bole, or ball, these words, all describing various kind of round, rounded, or swollen things, derive from a Proto Indo-European root meaning "to blow, inflate, or swell." This very productive root also spawned a whole slew of other words, including belly, billow, bellow, pillow, and, of course, phallus.

Passive Voice Day 2012

This guy Shaun declared April 27th Passive Voice Day, and wrote a post about it using entirely the passive voice. Language Log praised him for actually using the passive voice correctly throughout. In fact, lots of people (T.A.s, profs) angrily correct instances of what they think is the passive voice--considering all passives to be wrong and evil--that are actually participles and adjectival complements and not passives at all (see a great piece on this here). 

Titanic

The 19th century into the early 20th was a period when things titanic were in vogue.


Titan was the name, in Greek mythology, of the elder brother of Kronos and the ancestor of the Titans. In poetry it was also used to refer to his grandson, the Sun-god, Helios. The adjective titanic came to mean gigantic, colossal, thus in all ways resembling the nature or character of the Titans. This sense became progressively widened, coming into particularly wide usage in the 19th century, denoting a person, mountain, tree, etc. of gigantic stature or strength, physical or intellectual, a ‘giant." In 1796 titanium, one of the particularly strong rare metals, was given its name. Titanic, towards the end of the century, was applied descriptively to machines of great size and power, for example a dredger or a crane. 


Thus when the famous British liner of 1912 received its name, it was drawing on nearly a century of fascination with the large, the powerful, the mechanical, and drew from a legacy of Greek mythology that had for decades been applied to modern technological power. 

Tacks Day

It's tax time, and having reflected on taxes a bit, I found myself drawn to tacks, tack, and tackiness.


As my fourth grade teacher was fond of saying (and this was when Ross Perot was going around doing his shtick), flat tacks don't work. It's true, tacks need a point. A tack is something that fastens one thing to another thing using its sharp point. All sorts of small fasteners have been called tacks. Nowadays, we tend to think of the little ones we use on cork boards. 

Because my postings tend often to have something to do with ships, it is important to note that one particularly important kind of tack was used on a ship: one kind of "tack" was a rope, wire, or chain and hook used to secure to the ship's side the windward side of the lower square sails of the sailing ship in certain circumstances. "Tack" thus came to refer to the "lower windward corner of the sail" where such an attachment was fixed. 

From this we get the verb "to tack" which I remember learning at summer camp when we had sailing lessons. (I wasn't exactly a sailing master). It means to move in a zigzag way, keeping the boat in a 90 degree relationship to the wind, alternately on the port and starboard sides of the vessel. From this maneuver comes the more figurative sense of the verb: "To change one's attitude, opinion, or conduct; also, to proceed by indirect methods."

Tack is also something that sailors might eat on a ship. Hard tack, that is. This sense derives from a more metaphorical or abstract use of tack to mean "strength" or "sustenance," and thus came to be used to refer to foodstuff in general. Hard tack, or ships biscuit, was used from 1836 in opposition to "soft tack" which meant bread. 

Tacky in one sense means "sticky," that is, having the quality of sticking onto something. This usage is mainly attested in the 20th century. But the more common sense of this adjective now is different: "Dowdy, shabby; in poor taste, cheap, vulgar." The origin of this word, which is older, is obscure, and seems to relate to a 19th century usage of the word to refer to "A poor white of the Southern States from Virginia to Georgia," which in turn came from a use of the word to mean a "degenerate broken down horse." Its relationship to the sticky or fastener sense of tack is unclear, and there may not be a connection. 

How should we celebrate Tacks Day this year?

BAGGAGE

I'm on the road (i.e. air), so another travel-related post. Baggage, from bag, of course, is the collection of stuff that one packs up to take with him or her on a journey. It also has been used to refer to the portable equipment of an army that has to be packed up and moved around. 


In the sense that people generally don't like to carry stuff around, baggage has taken on some rather negative connotations beyond the usual "encumbrances" (many of them becoming obsolete): rubbish, dirt, corrupt matter, trashy stuff, dregs, riff-raff, the rites of Catholic worship (after the reformation), worthless people, and, my favorite, "A worthless good-for nothing woman; a woman of disreputable or immoral life, a strumpet." This last one is illustrated by the OED with a quote from 1601: "Every common soldior carrying with him his she-baggage." And another from 1712: "That Wife dying, I took another, but both proved to be idle Baggages."


I will hope that on the trip on which I am about to embark my baggage (none of it she-baggage) arrives without incident. 


(Perhaps I will investigate "luggage" in another post).

P

Book-Free Booking, Book-Free Books

Books didn't used to be an anachronism (and, for now, are still not), but the verb formed from that noun was: to book a ticket, since tickets have for some time been booked through electronic means. But now many books are electronic too, so both the book and the booking involve no book at all.

Of course, keeping the books, in the financial sense, also often involve no books, nor does cooking them.

Flotsam and Jetsam

I've always liked the words FLOTSAM and JETSAM. But can I use them in a sentence?

Constance Hale thinks she can.

In a recent New York Times piece, Hale compared different kinds of sentences to different kinds of boats:

There are as many kinds of sentences as there are seaworthy vessels: canoes and sloops, barges and battleships, Mississippi riverboats and dinghies all-too-prone to leaks.

But some sentences aren't really sentences at all. They don't have a subject (which she calls the 'what') and a predicate (the 'so what') so they are the "impostors, flotsam and jetsam — a log heading downstream, say, or a coconut bobbing in the waves without a particular destination."