WordPlay

by Kevin Cox

This column presents adventures in etymology,
or the study of the origins of words and phrases.

Last issue, I presented histories of some weather related phrases, one of which was the baseball term “rain check.” With the baseball season in full swing (pun not intended), here are some terms with baseball origins for your enjoyment (go Red Sox!):

Can of corn

According to Paul Dickson's New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, "can of corn" was first used in 1896 describing a fly ball hit so high that the fielder has time to stand directly under it. The common theory traces the phrase to old-fashioned grocery stores, where canned goods were stored high on shelves and pulled down with a long pole. An experienced store clerk would have no trouble catching the falling can, thus the term. Other theories trace "can of corn" to such fly balls being as easy to catch as "taking corn out of a can," or to the hollow "tin-canny" sound made by the bat when striking such a hit, or to an old-fashioned "cornball" confection made with popcorn and molasses (www.word-detective.com).

Shutout

Teams who fail to score even a single point in a game (especially in baseball) are often said to have been "shut out," which actually is a horse racing term. A late bettor arriving at the betting window at the last possible moment before a race may well find that the clerk has lowered the window shutter, literally "shutting him out" (www.word-detective.com).

Baseball

The rules for the modern game of baseball were set in 1845 by Alexander Cartwright and the other members of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. The next year, the first game of baseball, as we know it today, was played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. People have been playing games with bats, balls, and bases for a lot longer than this, and the word baseball is considerably older than the modern game.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for the term baseball is from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, written c.1815, "It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books." But even this is not the earliest recorded use of the term.

In 1744, John Newberry published a children's book, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, which contained the following poem. The book was originally published in London, but was reprinted several times in the United States:

B is for
Base-ball
The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy
To the next destin'd Post,
And then Home with Joy

(www.wordorigins.org)

Charley Horse

This American term dating from the 1880s, was originally a baseball slang term referring to a painful involuntary cramp in an arm or leg muscle, as a result of a muscular strain or a blow. There's a persistent story that the original Charley was a lame horse that pulled the roller at the White Sox ballpark in Chicago near the end of the 19th century. The American Dialect Society's archives reproduced a story that was printed in the Washington Post in 1907, long enough after the event that people were trying to explain something mysterious. This piece said the term referred to the pitcher Charley Radbourne, nicknamed “Old Hoss,” who suffered with this problem during a game in the 1880s; the condition was then named by putting together his first name and the second half of his nickname. The first recorded use, again from the ADS archives, is from an issue of The Sporting Life of 1886; that and other citations suggest it was coined not long before (www.quinion.com).

Southpaw

Humorist Finley Peter Dunne, then a sportswriter, coined this term for a left-handed baseball pitcher while covering sports in Chicago in the 1880s. Home plate in the Chicago ballpark was then to the west, so that a left-handed pitcher threw the ball from the "paw," or hand, on the south side. The word soon came to describe any left-hander (QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins).

Bullpen

The sense of bullpen as used in baseball, the place where relief pitchers warm up during a baseball game, was first used about 1915. The origin of this sense is uncertain and not related to the animal we call a bull.

There are a couple of interesting theories as to its origin. The most likely theory says that the term comes from the earlier meanings “a pen for bulls” and “a large cell or area for the temporary detention of prisoners.”

The baseball meaning may have come from the name of Bull Durham tobacco, because ballparks had the company's large, bull-shaped advertising signs on outfield fences as early as 1910. More likely, the Bull Durham signs reinforced the baseball meaning of bullpen but were not the origin of the sense (www.unm.edu).

In the Ballpark

This term has its roots in the field of astronautics in the late 1950s. When splashing down on earth, a spacecraft was said to be “in the ballpark” if it landed within a designated area. This was taken from baseball, of course, where balls that were hit within the ballpark were still playable, versus those hit out of the ballpark, which were usually home runs. The phrase first appeared in print in the astronautics context in 1960, when the San Francisco Examiner noted that although a capsule came down 200 miles from the center of its predicted impact area, it was still within the designated “ballpark” area.

The term spread from the astronautics industry and came to be applied to anything that was close to correct. The San Francisco Examiner used the full phrase “in the ballpark” in 1968. A ballpark figure is, of course, one that is “within range” of the true figure (www.randomhouse.com).

References

New Dickson Baseball Dictionary by Paul Dickson, quoted in www.word-detective.com/122099.html
www.wordorigins.org/wordorb.htm
www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-cha1.htm
QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson, quoted in www.unm.edu/~dave/words/menu.html
www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19990921

Kevin Cox, Editor of The Willamette Galley, is a technical writer, composer, and musician, and has been a member of STC since 2000. He enjoys the outdoors, music, genealogy, and playing with words. He can be reached at knccomm@yahoo.com.