[Ads-l] "love" (tennis etymythology)

[Stanton McCandlish]

> pool, Fr. poule (hen)

That one's also wrong, in half. It is from a French *poule*, but not the
word meaning 'hen'; rather, the direct cognate of English verb *pool*.
Pool in the billiards sense comes from bet-pooling in early games like
"life pool" (which was played on a pocketless table) in the 19th century,
and the habit of betting establishments (horse racing, etc.), known as
"pool rooms" for their betting-pool action, installing billiard tables for
customers to pass the time. (Source: Michael Ian Shamos, *The New
Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards*, 1999 [1993], New York: Lyons Press,
pp. 186–187.)

-- 
Stanton McCandlish
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------------------------------



On Mon, Jul 10, 2023 at 7:47 PM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> For my Wall Street Journal column this week, I'm looking into the popular
> etymythology for "love" as a score of no points in tennis. The commonly
> told story is that it's an Anglicization of French "l'œuf" because a zero
> is shaped like an egg. This has proved to be a sturdy canard despite zero
> evidence. I'm interested in how the story first circulated, and the
> earliest version I've found is from 1887.
>
> ---
> https://books.google.com/books?id=UUADAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA61
> Scottish Notes & Queries, Sept. 1887, p. 61, col. 1
> THE SCORING TERM "LOVE." -- I observe an answer to the query in your first
> number as to the origin of this term; but neither of the alternative
> suggestions seems to me satisfactory. I venture, with considerable
> confidence, to suggest that the word "Love," used both in billiards and
> lawn tennis, when no score had been made, is simply the French "l'œuf," the
> egg. My reasons for this opinion are: -- 1. The other English terms used in
> billiards -- the older of the two -- are, in several instances, derived
> from the French. Billiard, Fr. billard; cue, Fr. queue; pool, Fr. poule
> (hen), used where all the balls, the whole nest of eggs, come into play. 2.
> The word "l'oeuf" -- the egg -- might well be the figurative expression for
> a score amounting to nothing, generally represented by a round O, not
> unlike an egg. 3. If, as I have been informed, "no score" in another game
> -- cricket -- is named "a duck's egg," there is here a reverting in English
> to the original meaning of the French "l'œuf," which markers and others
> spell and pronounce "love." ALEX. D. MILNE.
> ---
>
> This theory was later popularized in the article "Sporting Terms in Common
> Speech" by Justice Phillimore in _The Monthly Review_, Vol. 25 (Nov. 1906),
> p. 82:
>
> https://books.google.com/books?id=O3NPAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA82
>
> ...and later still in _Word Ways: A Study of Our Living Language_ by Jerome
> C. Hixson and I. Colodny (1939), p. 127:
>
> https://archive.org/details/wordwaysstudyofo0000hixs/page/126/mode/2up
>
> Hixson & Colodny are cited in _American Notes & Queries_ 2 (1963) pp. 8-9,
> in turn cited in the OED3 entry for "love."
>
> Can anyone find any attestations of the "l'œuf" story before 1887?
>
> --bgz
>
> PS: _Word Ways_ co-author Isidor Omar Colodny was also the editor of the
> Los Angeles-based magazine _Words_, notable for hosting Dwight Bolinger's
> column "The Living Language" before H.L. Mencken convinced Bolinger to
> bring his talents to _American Speech_, where the feature was rechristened
> "Among the New Words." See Zimmer et al., "Seventy-Five Years Among the New
> Words," _AmSp_ 91(4) (Nov. 2016), pp. 472ff for more.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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