"Base ball"- BAY-zuh-ball

[Tom Zurinskas]

The word "baseball" reminds me of an incident.

I went to the ear doctor, and he ordered a hearing test.  The lady giving it had a heavy accent.  She said, "Say exactly what you hear."  Then she said,  "BAY-zuh-ball (~baezubaul)"  So I said "BAY-zuh-ball.  Then she said: "Foo-tuh-ball" (~fuetubaul).  And I said, "FOO-tuh-ball". And so on it went.

I came back to my wife laughing.  I hope she wasn't insulted.  She might think I was being a wise ass or not hearing incorrectly, or that I had a heavy accent myself.  We lolled.


Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
see truespel.com phonetic spelling




> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Robin Hamilton
> Subject: Re: "Base ball"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Anent Rounders and Baseball ...
>
> The OED (ROUNDER 2a. pl.) has the earliest reference to this as the name of
> a game from 1828.
>
> We can divide Games-Where-A-Ball-Is-Hit-By-A-Stick into three categories.
>
> Hit-on-the-ground [teams] -- lacrosse, hockey, polo, shinty
> Hit-in-the-air [individual, or pairs of participants] -- Tennis
> (original and modern), squash, badminton
> Throw-at-a-hitter [teams] -- cricket and (modern sense) baseball
>
> (Which leaves golf as an outlier, but then it originated in
> Scotland.)
>
> My sense from the various quotations deployed is that both Cricket and The
> Other Game originated as informal activities. In the UK, this division
> became formalised as cricket-with-rules (played predominantly by adults) and
> rounders (played predominantly by children and their parents, usually at the
> seaside).
>
> The earliest use of the term "base-ball" seems to be the occurrence in 1744:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Pretty_Pocket-Book
>
> "_A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Amusement of Little Master
> Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer_ is
> the title of a 1744 children's book by British publisher John Newbery. It is
> generally considered the first children's book, and consists of simple
> rhymes for each of the letters of the alphabet."
>
> The Wiki entry on this reproduces the appropriate page, with an image of
> three players, one of whom is holding a ball and presumably about to throw
> it. This is versified thus:
>
> The _Ball_ once struck off,
> Away flies the _Boy_
> To the next destin'd Post,
> And then Home with Joy.
>
> Thus there is a game which involves running from base to base extant in
> 1744, before the American colonies secede from their parent country, and
> this game is originally called (appropriately enough) "base-ball".
>
> Presumably this ur-game then evolves into the informal family game of
> rounders in the UK, and independently in the US into the formalised game of
> baseball. This would fit with the UK variety of the game not being called
> rounders (as such) till well into the nineteenth century.
>
> Robin
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "David A. Daniel"
> Sent: Monday, July 19, 2010 5:41 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: "Base ball"
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail
>> header -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>> Poster: "David A. Daniel"
>> Subject: Re: "Base ball"
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> That OED entry about baseball being a version of rounders was clearly
>> needling by the lexicographer/editor/publisher - whoever wrote it and/or
>> let
>> it go through. Brits love to tell Americans that the US national pastime
>> is
>> a UK little girls' game. They do that with many sports. For example,
>> according to the Brits: Pool is dumbed-down, simplified snooker (bigger
>> holes, smaller table); racquetball is dumbed-down, simplified squash (much
>> bouncier ball that requires less running-after); US football is rugby for
>> pansies (all the armor, rest times, etc.).
>>
>> Re baseball, I remember reading in one of Bill Bryson's books, that the
>> lexical evidence for baseball is actually older than for rounders, his
>> conclusion being that perhaps baseball came first and it is rounders that
>> is
>> the version. Dunno. George?
>> DAD
>>
>>
>>
>> If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
>> Of
>> George Thompson
>> Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2010 11:36 PM
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>> Subject: Re: "Base ball"
>>
>>
>>
>> I've been modestly waiting for one of my fans here to mention that I was
>> once famous -- internationally famous -- for 72 hours for finding a
>> paragraph in a newspaper of 1823 referring to a base ball game played on a
>> field once part of a rich guy's country estate, in Manhattan, on the west
>> side of Broadway, between Washington Place and Eighth street.
>> This was in 2001. Since then I have sunk back into obscurity, (where I
>> have
>> recently been joined by Paris Hilton -- obscurity is a rather crowded
>> spot:
>> avoid it, if you can).
>>
>> Previous to my 1823 paragraph, the earliest reference to "base ball" in
>> the
>> U. S. was a letter to a newspaper of Delhi, N. Y in 1825, from 9 guys from
>> Hamden, challenging the men of a neighboring village to a base ball game.
>> The fact that this letter was from 9 guys does not signify that the rules
>> of
>> base ball then required a 9 man team. There were only 9 guys in that
>> village willing to spend the time to play base ball together, to say
>> nothing
>> of putting up a dollar each as bait to incentivize (ahem) the guys in the
>> next village to take them up on the challenge.
>> Since 2001, John Thorn has found a village ordinance from western Mass.,
>> from the 1790s, forbidding boys to play base ball too near the village
>> public building -- they were breaking the windows too often. But my 1823
>> paragraph remains the earliest reference to the game played by grown-ups.
>>
>> Block quotes from an encyclopedia of the games of the world, compiled in
>> the
>> 1790s by a learned Kraut, which has an entry on the English game of
>> baseball, explaining how it was played (not the rules, since there was no
>> board or association to formulate rules, and enforce them).
>>
>> As for the OED on baseball, please remember that that entry was produced
>> when James Murray was but a youth -- and he was a Limey, at that. What
>> would he know?
>>
>> There are, I think, 4 occurrences of "base ball" in novels from ca
>> 1790-1810
>> by English women, Austen and 3 others, all referring to games played by
>> rather young girls.
>> Does this mean that a game for 10 or 12 year old girls, in being
>> transported
>> to the U. S., somehow became a game for grown men? Maybe. Or it means
>> that
>> only women novelists wrote with the sort of attention to children's life
>> that would produce references to their playtime activities. Or it means
>> that that the neglected and forgotten novels by women were suppressed by
>> patriarchy, and require rereading, to discover how wonderful they really
>> are, while the novels by men of that era are neglected and forgotten
>> because
>> they are no good, and they deserve to stay that way, and their references
>> to
>> baseballwill never be noticed. Or something else.
>>
>> The members of SABR devote themselves to, for instance, assembling and
>> when
>> necessary recreating the box scores of games played in earlier decades,
>> not
>> necessarily in the major leagues. Baseball fans tend to regard them as
>> harmless crackpots.
>> Among the members of SABR are a group who devote themselves to the study
>> of
>> 19th century baseball. The other members of SABR tend to regard them as
>> harmless crackpots. Among the members of SABR who are interested in 19th
>> C
>> baseball are a group who are interested in the prehistory of baseball.
>> The
>> other members of the 19th C clique tend to regard them as harmless
>> crackpots.
>>
>> There are hundreds of references from 18th and early 19th C newspapers,
>> diaries, letter collections, &c to "playing at ball", "a game of ball" and
>> other such phrases.
>> In a few cases it's clear that they refer to a bat & ball game. In a few
>> cases it's clear that they refer to playing catch, or to handball --
>> "fives"
>> (though there was a variation of fives which was played using a bat).
>> Presumably, among the rest, there are some -- a few of them, most or them,
>> ??? -- which refer to playing a bat & ball game, with base-running.
>> The references in the newspapers from NYC to playing ball tend to come
>> from
>> angry letters objecting to it being done on Sundays, and the writers of
>> these letters weren't concerned to state clearly the rules of the game
>> they
>> are frothing over.
>>
>> The supposition that the game of "base ball" played in New York in 1823
>> was
>> not in principle very different from the game being played in New York in
>> the 1850s is supported by the couple of references from the 1850s to "the
>> good old-fashioned game of baseball".
>>
>> There were two basic variations on baseball in prehistoric times, one now
>> referred to as the New York game and the other as the Massachusetts game.
>> The NY game was played with 4 bases arranged in a square, with the
>> beginning
>> and ending base at one corner. The Mass. game was played with the bases
>> arranged in a square, but with 5 bases, the fifth, the beginning and
>> ending
>> point, being in the middle of one side of the square.
>>
>> A journal, Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, has in preparation a
>> special issue devoted to the prehistory of the game, due, I believe, in
>> 2011.
>>
>> GAT
>>
>> George A. Thompson
>> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
>> Univ.
>> Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Jonathan Lighter
>> Date: Sunday, July 18, 2010 1:32 pm
>> Subject: Re: "Base ball"
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>
>>> Is baseball an American game? The modern rules were essentially laid
>>> down
>>> by Alexander Cartwright and his teammates in 1845.
>>>
>>> Is there any early description of the rules of Anglo-Irish
>>> "base-ball"? I
>>> suspect that they were largely adlibbed by the kids who mainly played
>>> it.
>>>
>>> IAC, I'd split the def. into two numbered senses.
>>>
>>> JL
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Jonathan Lighter
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> 1755 John Kidgell _The Card_ I (Dublin: Sam. Price) 8:
>>>> The younger part of the Family, perceiving Papa not inclined to
>> _enlarge_
>>>> upon the Matter, retired to an _interrupted_ Party at _Base-Ball_ (an
>>>> _infant_ game, which as it advances in its _Teens_, improves into
>> _Fives_,
>>>> and in its State of _Manhood_ is called _Tennis_.
>>>>
>>>> I take the connection to tennis to be facetious. Of interest is
>>> that the
>>>> game was evidently also known in Ireland at this date.
>>>>
>>>> JL
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Joel S. Berson
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>
>>>>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---
>>>>>
>>>>> A correspondent alleges the following references to "base ball" prior
>>>>> to 1800. Are these useful? Useless? Presumably unrelated to the
>>>>> American game, but so -- I assume -- is the OED's c1815 Jane Austen
>>>>> quote. They would be at least instances of the use of the phrase.
>>>>>
>>>>> I would look in the ADS-L archives except that there are over 1800
>>>>> messages with the word "baseball" in them -- and that's only since
>>> 1999.
>>>>>
>>>>> Joel
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>There are several references to base ball in England before in
>>>>>>writing before 1800.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>David Block, in his Baseball Before We Knew It mentions them in
>>>>>>several places, most notably in chapter10..
>>>>>
>>>>> [Apparently all the following are taken from Block and Wiles GB,
>> Preview.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>A book intended for children, A Pretty Little Pocket Book, mentions
>>>>>>a game for children in which they struck a ball and ran around bases.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Lady Hervey ( aka Mary Lepel) writes of the royal children playing
>>>>>>at base ball in a letter of November 1748. They played indoors with
>>>>>>aristocratic children and lords and ladies in waiting, it is assumed.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Then Jane Austen, writing in the 1790s, mentions that her heroine
>>>>>>Catherine preferred baseball to studies.
>>>>>
>>>>> [I read, actually first published in 1817, although probably written
>>>>> 1798-1799 and the OED cites c1815.]
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>In 1875 , in Jolly Games for Happy Homes describes a game without
>>> a
>>>>>>bat but which included running around bases. It was a game girls
>>>>>>could
>>>>> play.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Also mentioned is a quote from a character in a book of 1799,
>>>>>>Battleridge in which a man bemoans being sent to Geneva because, "No
>>>>>>more cricket, no more base-ball."
>>>>>
>>>>> Cooke, Cassandra. Battleridge: an historical tale, founded on facts
>>>>> ... By a lady of quality ... . London, G. Cawthorn,
>>>>> 1799. [Apparently in ECCO.]
>>>>>
>>>>> Joel
>>>>>
>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>>> truth."
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>> truth."
>>>
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>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
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>
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