"Upset" in horseracing

[George Thompson]

Fred Shapiro asks: "If the term "upset" meaning an unexpected victory does not derive from the Man o' War loss, isn't it remarkable that a horse named Upset pulled off the biggest, or one of the biggest upsets of all time?"

I think that the fact that Upset upset Man o' War  is an example of the working out of the Shandy-Lack Theory of Nomenological Determinism.   You will all recall that Tristram Shandy's father believed that a well-chosen or ill-chosen first name determined whether a child's life would be happy or troubled, and had chosen the name Trismegistus for his baby boy.  But by some confusion which I right now forget, the baby was baptised Tristram, whence all the sorrows he was to later know, starting with, but regrettably not ending with, the falling window-sash that caused such a dire amputation when he was still an infant.  This preiminary version of the Shandy-Lack theory is spelled out in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, for those of you who want to study it further.

David Lack was an English ornithologist -- his first book was The Life of the Robin -- who refined the theory and extended it to last names in a paper that enumerated the ornithologists whose last names were the names of species of birds, or parts of birds, as for instance Wing.  I read this essay many years ago, and forget where.   He published a book in 1964 called Enjoying Ornithology, which isn't available to me now, but sounds a more likely source than any of his other books.

Thus, the Shandy-Lack Theory of Nomenological Determinism holds that by the very force of its name, a horse called "Upset" would be destined to achieve the greatest upset in horse-racing history, and such proved to be the case.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.

----- Original Message -----
From: Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
Date: Thursday, November 14, 2002 2:10 pm
Subject: Re: "Upset" in horseracing

> OK, so this all leaves me with the question with which I believe I
> startedthe original thread some time ago:  If the term "upset"
> meaning an
> unexpected victory does not derive from the Man o' War loss, isn't it
> remarkable that a horse named Upset pulled off the biggest, or one
> of the
> biggest upsets of all time?  Even if the owner chose the name
> because he
> had some dreams of the horse someday doing something terrific,
> what are
> the chances that the horse would ever be in the position to pull
> off an
> historic win, or that the horse would be good enough to pull off
> the win
> but not so good as to make it not an upset?
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
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