fiscal / procurator-fiscal

4 July 2025

One of my favorite TV shows is Shetland, a police procedural set, obviously, on the Shetland Islands. One of the words that keeps popping up is fiscal. The detectives talk of referring matters to the “fiscal” or someone has to fly to Aberdeen to meet with the “fiscal office.” At first I thought it was just a reference to monetary matters—after all investigations cost money and a high-profile murder case is going to need a lot of that—but it soon became clear that the context the word was used had to do with the prosecution of crimes and matters relating to what in the United States would be handled by a coroner’s office. I had stumbled on a common word that means something quite different in the jargon of the Scottish legal system; fiscal is shorthand for procurator-fiscal, the title given to a prosecutor in Scotland.

Fiscal comes to us from Romance languages and ultimately from Latin. Fiscus is the Latin word for the state treasury, and fiscalis is an adjective relating to matters concerning the public purse. A fiscus is literally a basket, originally a woven container for storing money which subsequently developed a figurative sense relating to the treasury or monetary matters. This monetary sense is present in classical Latin, and it can be found in Anglo-Latin from the early eighth century. The later borrowing into English was also influenced by Norman French. In English-language use, fiscal appears by the late sixteenth century. Here it is in the 1570 edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments:

Also, seing they [i.e., prelates] may bee alienated, they may be prescribed, especiallye (the kynges thus consenting who co[n]firmed the same so long a time) which excludeth all ryght both fiscall and ecclesiasticall.

This monetary sense is the one that is most prevalent in English around the world today.

Procurator also has its origins in Latin, but it is an older borrowing into English than fiscal. It comes to English from Latin via Anglo-Norman. In Latin a procurator is a manager or overseer of an estate, and during the Roman empire the word was also used to mean a tax-collector. In Anglo-Norman, the word referred to an agent or attorney who acted on behalf of another or a manager of an estate or a religious house or abbey, and the word is recorded at the beginning of the thirteenth century. That’s the sense that made it into English in the early fourteenth century. There is this description of Mary Magdalene from the c. 1300 Early South English Legendary and describes her as Christ’s procurator, the keeper of his household:

Marie þe Maudeleyne : ore swete louerd hire schrof,
Swete Iesu crist out of hir e : seue deuelene he drof.
Ore louerd makede hire is procuratour : his leof and is hostesse;
heo louede him with gret honour : in pays and in destresse.

(Mary Magdalene, our dear lord confessed her. Dear Jesus Christ drove seven devils out of her. Our lord made her his procurator, his beloved and his hostess; she loved him with great devotion, in peace and in distress.)

By the end of the fourteenth century, procurator had acquired an additional sense of an attorney or advocate, an extension of the agent sense. We see this sense in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale:

May I nat axe a libel, sire somonour,
And answere there by my procuratour
To swich thyng as men wole opposen me?

(May I not ask for a written copy of the charge, sir summoner,
And answer through my procurator
To such thing as men will accuse me?)

And in Scotland procurator combined with fiscal, and a procurator-fiscal was a prosecutor of crimes and served as a coroner. Originally, the procurator-fiscals were responsible for collecting fines, but the duties expanded over time. Scottish use of procurator, meaning prosecutor, can be found by the start of the fifteenth century. Procurator-fiscal in that sense appears by the middle of the sixteenth century. And by the late seventeenth century, procurator-fiscal was being clipped to just fiscal, which brings me full circle back to the TV series Shetland.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 4, 2017, s.v. projuratour, n. https://anglo-norman.net/entry/procuratour

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Friar’s Tale” (c. 1395). The Canterbury Tales, 3.1595–97. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Foxe, John. The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contayning the Actes and Monumentes of Thynges Passed in Euery Kynges tyme in this Realme. London: John Daye, 1570, 456/2. ProQuest: Early English Books Online. Transcription available at: The Acts and Monuments Online.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. The Early South English Legendary (c. 1300). Early English Text Society O.S. 87. London: N. Trübner, 1887, lines 137–40, 466. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Latham, Ronald E., David R. Howlett, and Richard K. Ashdowne, eds. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. fiscalis, fiscus, procurator. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1879, s. v. fiscalis, fiscus, procurator. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. procuratour, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2007, s. v. procurator, n.1; procurator-fiscal, n.; second edition, 1989, s. v. fiscal, adj. and n.

Image credit: Shetland Times, 3 October 2024. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of the image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

star-spangled / spangle

2 July 2025

Fort McHenry, Baltimore, Maryland

We all know that Francis Scott Key wrote the Star-Spangled Banner in 1814 after watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor:

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But most of us don’t know what a spangle is or that Key wasn’t the first to refer to the U.S. flag as the star-spangled banner. Key wasn’t even the first poet to write an ode to the flag that was set to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven, which is better known today as the melody of the U.S. national anthem.

A spangle is a shiny piece of metal used to decorate fabric—similar to a sequin. The origin is a bit muddied, with a precursor in Old English, but with the modern meaning heavily influenced by a borrowing from Middle Dutch.

In Old English, a spang is a clasp or fastener. The word appears in the Old English biblical poem Genesis in a passage about Satan preparing to travel to Earth to tempt Adam and Eve:

Angan hine þa gyrwan    Godes andsaca,
fus on frætwum    —hæfde fæcne hyge—
hæleð-helm on heafod asette    and þone full hearde geband,
spenn mid spangum.

(Then God’s adversary began to prepare himself, eager in his adornments—he had deceitful intentions—he set a helmet of invisibility on his head and fastened it very firmly, bound with clasps.)

By the beginning of the fifteenth century, we see that spang had lost the meaning of a clasp and acquired that of a small, metal ornament. This shift in meaning is probably from a borrowing of the Middle Dutch spang, which had the ornament sense in addition to that of a clasp. And in the fifteenth century we start seeing the form spangle. Here is an example from a 6 June 1462 inventory of items, made by John Paston, that had belonged to Sir John Falstolf (1380–1459, the real-life namesake of Shakespeare’s fictional character):

Item, a litell cheyne of gold wyth a perle hangyng therby and ij spangell[es] of gold.

(The Paston family papers are a treasure trove of linguistic and historical information about daily, albeit aristocratic, life in the fifteenth century.)

And we see the verb to spangle, meaning to decorate with the same, by 1548, when it appears in Edward Hall’s description of Henry VIII’s New Year’s festivities 1510–11:

In came the kyng with fiue other, appareled in coates, the one halfe of russet satyn, spangeld with spangels of fine gold, the other halfe riche clothe of gold, on their heddes cappes of russet satin, embroudered with workes of fine gold bullio[n].

The adjective spangled is in place by 1555, when it appears in a description of the clothing of the people of Panchaia, an island said to be in the Indian Ocean (exactly where Panchaia was is uncertain; it may be fictional, or perhaps it is Socotra or Bahrain):

Their garmentes by the reason of the finesse of the wolle of their shiepe specially aboue other, are verye softe and gentle clothe. Bothe menne and women vse ther, to sette oute them selues with Iuelles of golde, as cheines, braselettes, eareringes, tablettes, owches, ringes, Annuletes, buttons, broches, and shoes embraudred, and spangled with golde, of diuers colours.

And we see star-spangled by 1600 in poetic lines attributed to Thomas Dekker in Robert Allott’s collection of poetry titled Englands Parnassus:

Great Delian Priest, we to adore thy name,
Haue burnt fat thighes of Bulls in hallowed flame,
vvhose sauour wrapt in smoake and clowdes of fire
To thy starre-spangled Pallace did aspire.

Star-spangled became a rather common adjective referring to the night sky and other heavenly things. And the term was applied to the American flag as early as 1805 when it appears in a patriotic song set to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven, the same tune that Key’s poem would be set to and which is familiar to us today as the US national anthem. The song was printed in Baltimore’s American and Commercial Daily Advertiser on 14 December 1805. According to that paper, it had been sung at a 30 November 1805 dinner at McLaughlin’s Tavern in Georgetown (now part of Washington, DC) in honor of naval captains Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart, heroes of the First Barbary War (1801–05). The third verse of that song reads:

In the conflict resistless, each toil they endur’d
Till their foes shrunk dismay’d from the war’s desolation;
And pale beam’d the Crescent, it’s splendour obscur’d
By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation,
Where each flaming star gleam’d a meteor of war,
And the turban’d heads bow’d to the terrible glare,
Then mixt with the olive the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.

Note that Key was a resident of Georgetown at this time and may have attended the dinner. He also called Baltimore home and would have been familiar with that city’s newspapers. The lyrics, especially the chorus, marked in italics in the paper, bear a similarity to the lines that Key would later write.

That 1805 song used the phrase star-spangled flag, but star-spangled banner is applied to the American flag as early as 1808, in an Ode to Independence, also set to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven. The poem was published in another Baltimore paper, the Whig, on 27 June 1808. The second verse of the ode reads:

Inspired by the genius, our fathers unfurl’d
    Her star-spangled banner, and own’d her dominion;
Bade their cannon indignant proclaim to the world
    Their oath to be freemen in act and opinion.
        While her eagle on high,
        Flashing fire from his eye,
Saw the olive disdain’d—and his thunders let fly.

Key would write his version, originally titled The Defence of Fort M’Henry, six years later.

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Sources:

Thanks to Kenneth Liss for pointing out the 1805 quotation to me.

Allott, Robert. Englands Parnassus: or the Choysest Flowers of Our Moderne Poets.” London: For N. Ling, C. Burby, and T. Hayes, 1600, 373. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

The Fardle of Facions Conteining the Aunciente Maners, Customes, and Lawes, of the Peoples Enhabiting the Two Partes of the Earth, Called Affrike and Asia. London: John Kingston and Henry Sutton, 1555, sig. H2v–H3r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

“Genesis.” In Old Testament Narratives. Daniel Anlezark, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 7. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, 33–34, lines 442–45.

Hall, Edward. The Vnion of the Two Nobel and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke. London: Richard Grafton, 1548, fol. 16r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

“Inventory and indenture: Draft 1462, 6 June.” Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part 1. Norman Davis, ed. Early English Text Society S.S. 20. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004, 1:108. Archive.org.

“McLaughlin’s Tavern.” American and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore, Maryland), 14 December 1805, 3/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. spang, n., spangled, adj.

“An Ode to Independence.” Whig (Baltimore), 27 June 1808, 3/2.  Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2016, s.v. star-spangled, adj., star-spangled banner, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. spangled, adj., spangle, v., spangle, n.1, spang, n.1.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2024. Licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

don't look a gift horse in the mouth

30 June 2025

The proverb don't look a gift horse in the mouth dates back to antiquity. The phrase’s underlying metaphor is that a horse’s age can be judged by examining its teeth, and it is rude to question something that is freely given. There are calques of the ancient proverb in many present-day European languages.

Jerome references the proverb in the prologue to his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, written in 386 C.E., when he takes aim at his critics:

Non digne Graeca in Latinum transfero: aut Graecos lege (si ejusdem linguae habes scientiam); aut si tantum Latinus es, noli de gratuito munere judicare, et, ut vulgare proverbium est: Equi dentes inspicere donati.

(Do I not translate Greek words into Latin properly? Then read the Greeks, if you have knowledge of that language, or if you have only Latin, do not judge a free gift and, as the common proverb goes, look a gift‐horse in the mouth.)

An early English version of the proverb can be found in John Stanbridge’s c. 1509 Vulgaria, a a book of Latin–English vocabulary that contains collection of proverbs:

A gyuen hors may not be loked in the tethe

A form of the maxim that is more familiar to us today can be found in John Heywood’s 1546 book of proverbs:

Where gyfts be gyuen freely, est west north or south,
No man ought to loke a geuen hors in the mouth.

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Sources:

Heywood, John. A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1546, sig. B2v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Jerome. “Prologus.” Commentariorum in Epistolam ad Ephesios Libri Tres. ProQuest: Patrologia Latina, 26:439B. 

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. horse, n.

Stanbridge, John. Vlgaria Stanbrigi. c. 1509, sig. C4r. Archive.org.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Meaning and Origin of ‘Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth.’” Wordhistories.net, 4 June 2017.

Photo credit: Rachel C., 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

loo

27 June 2025

Loo, the British word for a lavatory or toilet is one of those words that has generated endless speculation and myth about its origin. It is almost certainly from the French lieu, meaning place, a euphemism if there ever was one. The English loo doesn’t make an unambiguous appearance until 1940, but there is good evidence the slang term was in use since at least the late nineteenth century, and the use of the euphemism in French is much older.

In French, the plural lieux is attested as a euphemism for latrines as early as the 1640s, and by 1802 the term lieux d’aisance (places of comfort) was in use. The crossover from French to English is seen in a 1782 letter by English poet and clergyman William Mason:

I am glad your Lieux are likely to become sweet, but I still fear about them. I always suspected that the smell came from the great drain under the house, and when a drain is so situated, & when these places communicate with it, & have not a drain appropriated to themselves, ’tis hardly possible to cure the evil. I am myself employed in constructing a lieu here in our great Residentiary house, & tho’ I have many & great difficulties to encounter I trust it will turn out a paragon, both for sweetness, utility, & cheapness.

While this is just a single example of the French word making its way int English speech, there were undoubtedly other such uses over the centuries that have gone unrecorded.

A 22 June 1895 cartoon in Punch puns on the word when it depicts a curate giving the instruction to his choir:

UNDESIGNED COINCIDENCE
Curate (to Parish Choir, practising the Anthem). “Now, we’ll begin again at ‘Hallelujah,’ and please linger longer on the ‘Lu’!”

While the context of the image has nothing to do with the lavatory, the cartoon would simply not have been funny unless loo was an already established euphemism, and the cartoon’s title of Undesigned Coincidence makes it clear that punning is going on here.

And in 1922, James Joyce includes this line in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus is playing the role of a Frenchman:

BELLA
(clapping her belly sinks back on the sofa, with a shout of laughter) An omelette on the  …. Ho! ho! ho! ho! … omelette on the ….

STEPHEN
(mincingly) I love you, sir darling. Speak you englishman tongue for double entente cordiale. O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset.

But the first utterly unambiguous, published use of loo in English that I’m aware of is in Nancy Mitford’s 1940 novel Pigeon Pie:

“How strange everything seems now that the war is here,” she said. “I suppose it is unreal because we have been expecting it for so long now, and have known that it must be got over before we can go on with our lives. Like in the night when you want to go to the loo and it is miles away down a freezing cold passage and yet you know you have to go down that passage before you can be happy and sleep again.

The reason why its unambiguous appearance is so late is undoubtedly due to two factors. One, it is slang and therefore less likely to appear in published, and therefore preserved, writing. And two, it is related to a bodily function, a subject that more genteel publications avoided.

There are any number of myths about loo’s origin, but perhaps the most common is that it is a clipping of the cry gardyloo, an alteration of the French gare l’eau (beware of the water) allegedly used before emptying a chamber pot out a window and onto the street. But there is no evidence connecting the warning cry with the modern slang term. It’s also been suggested that it comes from the French bourdaloue, a type of chamber pot, from ablution, and from Waterloo, a pun on water closet as in the Joyce quotation above. But again, there’s no real evidence for any of these conjectures.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 30 May 2025, s.v. loo, n.1.

Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922). Hans Walter Gabler, ed. New York: Vintage, 1986, 15:3910–16, 465.

Mason, William. Letter, 14 November 1782. In The Harcourt Papers, vol. 7 of 14, Edward William Harcourt, ed. Oxford: James Parker, 1883, 78–79. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mitford, Nancy. Pigeon Pie (1940). Feltham, Middlesex, England: Hamlyn, 1982, 20. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2016, s. v. loo, n.4; second edition, 1989, gardyloo, n.

“Undesigned Coincidence” (cartoon). Punch, 22 June 1865, 294. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credits: photo by Gregory David, 2007, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license; cartoon by an unknown artist, Punch, 22 June 1865, 294. HathiTrust Digital Archive, public domain image.

baseball

“Base-Ball,” from the 1787 edition of John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book

25 June 2025

When examining the origins of a word one must be careful to distinguish between the word and the thing itself. The origin of the word is often quite different from the origin of the thing that it represents. Such is the case with baseball. In this case the word is older than the game we today know by that name.

The word baseball dates to the 1740s. What may be the oldest known use of the word is in John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, which was the first children’s book for entertainment, as opposed to education, ever published. The book was first published in 1744, although no copies of the first nine editions survive. Baseball appears in the 1760 edition and probably appeared in the earlier editions as well. The book, originally published in London, but reprinted several times in the United States, contains the following poem, which does contain a bit of moral education and a justification for colonialism:

Base-Ball
The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy
To the next destin’d Post,
And then Home with Joy.

Moral
Thus Britons for Lucre
Fly over the Main;
But, with Pleasure transported,
Return back again.

The game described in Newbery’s book bears little resemblance to the modern game of baseball other than the use of a ball and bases. Judging from the picture that accompanies the poem, they didn’t even use a bat, instead striking the pitched ball with their hand. But despite the differences, this game of English baseball is clearly the progenitor of the modern game.

The earliest undisputed use of the word appears by the English Baroness Hervey (née Mary Lepell), who mentions the game in a 14 November 1748 letter:

The town is sickly; and nothing seems prosperous but gaming and gamesters. ’Tis really prodigious to see how deep the ladies play: but, in spite of all these irregularities, the Prince’s family is an example of innocent and cheerful amusements. All this last summer they played abroad; and now, in the winter, in a large room, they divert themselves at base-ball, a play all who are, or have been, schoolboys, are well acquainted with. The ladies, as well as gentlemen, join in this amusement.

The “prince” is Frederick, Prince of Wales, the father of King George III. George was ten years old and presumably participated in the game. The irony of George III playing what would become America’s pastime is palpable. And note on this occasion the game was played indoors, much like children might do today during inclement weather.

A few years later, clergyman John Kidgell gives a somewhat more deprecatory description of the game in his 1755 book The Card:

And 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.)

The game of baseball was quite common in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, played by girls as well as boys. It even merits a mention by Jane Austen, who refers to the game in Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, but perhaps written as early as 1798:

It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books—or at least books of information—for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided that they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

From these early uses it is clear that in England, at least, baseball was considered a children’s game, and not a proper pastime for older children or adults.

The earliest known American mention of the game is in a 22 March 1786 diary entry by John Rhea Smith, a student at the College of New Jersey (what would become Princeton University):

Extract from John Rhea Smith’s diary of 22 March 1786 containing the earliest known American reference to baseball

A fine day play baste ball in the campus but am beaten for I miss both catching and striking the Ball.

Smith wrote “baste ball,” probably because he had never seen the name written and, as this was only for personal use, he was not being careful about spelling or grammar. But it is clear that he was referring to baseball, as the school’s faculty saw fit to ban the game in November 1787, and in doing so they described it:

It appearing that a play at present much practiced by the smaller boys among the students and by the grammar scholars with balls and sticks in the back common of the College is in itself low and unbecoming gentlemen & students and in as much as it is an exercise attended with great danger to the health by sudden and alternate heats and colds as it tends by accidents almost unavoidable in that play to disfiguring and maiming those who are engaged in it for whose health and safety as well as improvement in study as far as depends on our exertions we are accountable to their Parents & liable to be severely blamed by them: and in as much as there are many amusements both more honourable and more useful in which they are indulged: Therefore the Faculty think incumbent on them to prohibit both the students & grammar scholars from using the play aforesaid.

From this description, it appears that the American version had already diverged from the English one. For one thing, it was being played with bats, while it is not clear that at this time the English version was. And from the use of “disfiguring” and “maiming,” while perhaps something of an exaggeration, it is clear that it was a rougher game, one not suitable for small children, or—in the sensibilities of the eighteenth century—women.

Another early ban of the game, but for a different reason, occurred on 5 September 1791, when the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts passed an ordinance to protect the newly installed windows of the town meeting house:

Be it ordained by the said Inhabitants that no person or Inhabitant of said Town, shall be permitted to play at any game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Batball, Football, Cats, Fives or any other game or games with Balls, within the Distance of eighty yards from said Meeting House.

The origin of the word baseball is also complicated by the existence of another game known as prisoner’s base or simply base. References to this game go back to the fourteenth century, but the game of base is probably not an ancestor of baseball. Base did not even use a ball, being simply a chase game. Still, researchers often confuse the two when finding early references to people “playing a game of base.”

So that’s where the word comes from, but when did the modern game of baseball come into being? There is no single defining moment. Instead, modern American baseball took a slow evolutionary journey from the roots in the English game.

There are many myths about the origin of American baseball. Perhaps the three most common are that it 1) was invented by Abner Doubleday in 1839; 2) was invented by Alexander Cartwright in 1845; and 3) derives from the English game of rounders. None of these are accurate.

The Doubleday myth got its start in 1905 when a certain Abner Graves claimed to have witnessed Abner Doubleday invent the game of (and the word) baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. Doubleday would later go on to win fame as general in the US Civil War. As we have seen, both the word and the game are older than this, and, besides, Abner Doubleday was a cadet at West Point in the spring of 1839 and could not have been in Cooperstown to invent the sport. Graves, who was only six years old at the time, probably witnessed a game of early baseball and misremembered the details—for instance, a cousin of the famous Doubleday may have played in the game and Graves later conflated the two. Graves also changed his story over the years, and as he retold it, it not only grew in detail, but he, himself, became a player in that game and not merely a witness.

Another myth is the claim that the rules for the modern game of baseball were laid down in 1845 by Alexander Cartwright and the other members of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. According to this story, the first game of modern baseball was played the following year at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. (The Knickerbockers lost that game to the New York Baseball Club.) The Knickerbocker club did indeed codify a set of rules to baseball in 1845, but Cartwright himself probably had nothing to do with it, as he did not become an officer of the club until later. And the team did play in Hoboken in 1846, but again there was nothing groundbreaking about this.

The Knickerbocker Club was not even the first to codify the rules of the game. The earliest known publication of baseball rules dates to some fifty years earlier, and in Germany of all places. In 1796, Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths described Ball mit Freystäten (oder das englische Base-ball), which translates as Ball with Sanctuaries (or English Base-ball). GutsMuths described a game that at its core resembles the modern game. It uses a bat, a ball, and a variable number of bases. The pitcher serves the ball to the batter, who has three attempts to put it into play. On hitting the ball, the batter attempts to round the bases, and batters/runners are put out if the ball is caught, they are touched with the ball, or the ball arrives at a base before them.

Nor were the Knickerbocker games of 1846 the first organized games of baseball as many believe. Organized ball was played in Manhattan as early as the 1820s, as this citation from the 25 April 1823 edition of the National Advocate indicates:

I was last Saturday much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly and athletic game of “base ball” at the Retreat in Broadway (Jones’)[.] I am informed they are an organized association, and that a very interesting game will be played on Saturday next at the above place, to commence at half past 3 o’clock, P. M. Any person fond of witnessing this came may avail himself of seeing it played with consummate skill and wonderful dexterity[.] It is surprising, and to be regretted that the young men of our city do not engage more in this manual sport; it is innocent amusement, and healthy exercise, attended with but little expense, and has no demoralizing tendency.

Finally, there were significant differences between the Knickerbocker rules and the ones we know today. The Knickerbocker rules stated play would continue until one team scored twenty-one aces (presumably meaning runs, but the rules did not define the term) instead of nine innings. The 1845 rules had the bases approximately seventy-five feet from each other, instead of the modern ninety. Pitches were delivered underhand. And the number of players on each side was not stated in the rules (presumably it would vary from game to game). The one great innovation of the Knickerbocker rules was that they allowed for force outs and tag outs at the bases, where previously one had to throw and hit the runner with the ball to get him out. So while the Knickerbocker rules were an important milestone in the evolution of baseball, they did not constitute a watershed.

The final myth we’ll address here is that baseball derives from the English game of rounders. This is not correct. American baseball and English rounders are both descendants of English baseball, with significant changes in rules, as well as a name change, occurring over the centuries.

The name rounders does not appear until 1828, in William Clarke’s Boy’s Own Book:

In the west of England this is one of the most favourite sports with bat and ball. In the metropolis, boys play a game very similar to it, called Feeder. In Rounders, the players divide into two equal parties, and chance decides which shall have the first innings.

Rounders started out as simply a name for a regional variant of English baseball. By the time the name rounders was coined, baseball was already well established in America. Gradually, this regional name supplanted the use of baseball throughout England, so by the time that Americans began investigating the origins of their national pastime at the beginning of the 20th century, the name baseball had been all but forgotten in England, leaving only the familiar rounders.

So that’s where the term baseball comes from, an eighteenth-century English children’s game that evolved into the adult, American sport we know today.

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Sources:

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, vol. 1 of 4. London: John Murray, 1818. 7–8. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Block, David, Baseball Before We Knew It, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 50-57, 67, 140, 148–49, 178–79, 122–23.

Clarke, William. The Boy’s Own Book. Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1829, 20. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hwhlcq&seq=32 (The term rounders does not appear in the 1828 first edition of Clarke’s book. I cannot locate a copy of the second edition, also from 1828, in which the OED says it does appear. I cite here the first American edition, which is from 1829.)

“Communication.” National Advocate (New York), 25 April 1823, 2/4. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

GutsMuths, Johann Christian Friedrich. “Ball mit Freystätten. (oder das englische Base-ball).” In Speile zur Uebung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde Unschuldiger Jugendfreuden. Schnepfenthal: 1796, 78–84. Google Books.

Kidgell, John. The Card, vol. 1. London: J. Newbery, 1755, 9. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Lepell, Mary. Letter, 14 November 1748. In Letters of Mary Lepel [sic], Lady Hervey. London: John Murray, 1821, 139–140. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Newbery, John. A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. London: J. Newbery, 1760, C4r. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 

Oxford English Dictionary Online, third edition, September 2011, s. v. baseball, n.; March 2011, s.v. rounder, n.2.

Thorn, John. “The Pittsfield ‘Baseball’ Bylaw of 1791: What It Means.” Medium.com, 3 August 2011.

Woodward, Ruth L. “Journal at Nassau Hall: The Diary of John Rhea Smith, 1786.” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 46.3. Spring 1985, 269–91 at 286–87. JSTOR.

Image credits: John Newbery, A Pretty Little Pocket Book, Worcester, Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, 1787, 43. Library of Congress. Public domain image; John Rhea Smith, 1786. Library of Congress. Public domain image.