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

[Peter Reitan]

"Goose egg" was in use for a scoreless inning in baseball by the mid-1870s.
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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2023 7:46:56 PM
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Subject: "love" (tennis etymythology)

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Subject:      "love" (tennis etymythology)
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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'=C5=93uf" because a z=
ero
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=3DUUADAAAAYAAJ&pg=3DPA61
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'=C5=93uf,=
" 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'=C5=93uf," which markers and other=
s
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=3DO3NPAQAAMAAJ&pg=3DRA1-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'=C5=93uf" 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.

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