Made In America - Bill Bryson [183]
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.39
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.40 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.41
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’.42
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