Baseball, barbecue and all that jazz




Baseball, for instance. I grew up thinking the game had been invented by a U.S. army officer named Abner Doubleday in a pasture near Cooperstown, N.Y. Perhaps some fans still believe this, as the Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Cooperstown and has little interest in revising the tale. Doubleday never claimed to have devised the rules of America’s national pastime; he died in 1893, 15 years before an official commission charged with uncovering the game’s origins named him as its inventor. Americans were happy to accept the commission’s findings as opposed to the inconvenient truth: Baseball is a British sport.

Though its earliest origins remain obscure, the word first appeared in print in 1744, in a little rhyme-book for children by the London publisher John Newbery. Under the title “Base-Ball,” Newbery wrote: “The ball once struck off, / Away flies the boy / To the next destined post / And then home with joy.” Not enough proof for you? Try a 1796 book on popular pastimes by a German author, Johann Gutsmuths. “Englische Base-Ball,” he wrote, is a team game in which “the batter has three attempts to hit the ball while at the home plate.” A few years later, Jane Austen mentioned baseball in her novel Northanger Abbey. Some sources (including one of the most popular online dictionaries) still try to claim these authors really meant the children’s game of rounders even if they happened to write “baseball.” I think that if the word walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and flies like a duck, it’s unlikely to be a catbird in disguise.

“Catbird seat” (sitting pretty) may indeed be a baseball expression by origin, though “southpaw” (left-handed) is not. An article published in 1848 referred to a southpaw in a boxing match, decades before its first recorded use on the baseball diamond. But if there’s uncertainty about how these terms sprang to life, it pales into insignificance compared to the battles that still rage about the origin of the term whose sound defines the beginning of every Montreal summer: jazz. As the lexicographer Michael Quinion once noted, “There are more folk etymologies around this word than almost any other, many of them vehemently held in defiance of the evidence.”

Does it come from a dancing slave named Jasper, a Chicago musician called Jasbo or a band conductor in New Orleans who was nicknamed Mr. Razz? Almost certainly not. Does it derive from the biblical Jezebel (a villainous princess), the French “jaser” (to gossip), the Arabic “jazib” (an alluring person) or the Creole “jass” (strenuous activity, especially of the sexual kind)? Probably not the first three; possibly the fourth. Yet Garvin Bushell, a jazz woodwind player of distinction, believed we owe the word to oil of jasmine. If a working girl in New Orleans in the early-20th century added this scent to her perfume, she was said to be “jassing it up.” Yet in San Francisco, gamblers in 1913 were saying “come on, the old jazz” as they rolled the dice. Other possible sources include vaudeville and (believe it or not) baseball. Ultimately a sexual origin for “jazz” appears the most likely, but the exact route it took as it boogied into mainstream English may remain a mystery forever.

The history of “barbecue” is clearer.

Don’t bother suggesting, though, that the word comes from the French “barbe à queue,” beard to tail. The Oxford English Dictionary is unusually severe about this notion: “an absurd conjecture based merely on the sound of the word.” The accepted origin is a Spanish word, “barbacoa,” which the invaders took from the indigenous Arawak people they had displaced and slaughtered. To the Arawak, a “barbacoa” was a wooden frame on posts, used either for sleeping or for storing meat and fish to be dried. The word entered English print in 1661, when the author of a book about Jamaica described animals that “are slain, and their flesh forthwith Barbacu’d.”

He meant dried and smoked, not cooked on a grill while you listen to jazz and watch a baseball game on TV.



Story Tools





The Gazette Headline News

Sign up to receive daily headline news from The Gazette.
Subscribe to The Gazette and stay connected your way