Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days!

[Larry Trask]

On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Jim Rader wrote:

> The baseball diamond theory of the origin of <southpaw> is almost
> certainly folklore.  Note that the OED's first citation for the word,
> in the sense "blow with the left hand," is from 1848.  Organized
> baseball was in its infancy in the 1840's and conventions for laying
> out diamonds were very unlikely to have existed so early that a
> transferred sense of the word could have arisen by 1848.  Also, the
> Survey of English Dialects recorded <south-pawed> meaning
> "left-handed" in Cumberland--suggesting that the association of south
> with the left hand did not originate in the U.S.

Many thanks for the correction.  I had been wondering about that first
OED quotation.

Odd, though, that the word makes perfect sense in baseball, and not
elsewhere.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk