[Ads-l] Antedating of "Hockey" (Game Played on Ice)

[Stanton McCandlish]

On Fri, Aug 9, 2024 at 4:02 PM Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> The Morning Post (London), December 28, 1822, page 3.  Newspapers.com.
> [Excerpt] A respectable youth of the name of Leatherbarrel, was amusing
> himself with fetching a bung to play at hockey, on a sheet of ice in St.
> James’s Park, which was not bearable. It gave way, and a person from the
> bank of the canal rushed into the water to save the youth’s life. His
> humane endeavours failed, at the risk of his own life. The body of the
> youth was taken up and conveyed to the Ship at Charing-cross, for the
> inspection of a Coroner’s Jury. [End Excerpt].


Both "amusing" and "bearable" in this seem rather unusual. The first
clearly has "fetching" as the referent, though the task of retrieving the
bung-puck would not appear to be the amusement by current standards of
meaning; rather, the "play[ing] at hockey" would be. The second could in
theory also refer to the "fetching" action, but the position after "a sheet
of ice", followed immediately by "It gave way" in reference to said ice
sheet, strongly suggest that the intended meaning is that the ice sheet was
not "bearable" in a sense meaning 'able to bear something, such as a
weight', a usage we seem to have lost.  But it could just be clumsy writing
in both cases. I read a fair amount of material from this era, but it's
usually academic and British, not journalistic and American, so I'm not
really sure.

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