Word of the Month - Sports

         Sports.  This one simple word, which we’ll be hearing an awful lot of as the Superbowl and the Winter Olympics take over conversation next month, actually has a lot of interesting linguistic stuff going on.  The etymology goes back to Middle English, about 1300 when Anglo-French disport meant “pleasure, enjoyment” as a noun, as well as a verb meaning “to take pleasure or amuse oneself.”  The roots here are dis- meaning “away” plus -port meaning “to carry,” as in porter, portage, import, export, deport, and even important (but that’s  a story for another day).  So basically, the roots of disport meant “to carry away.”  Disport was shortened into sport around 1400.  So it’s interesting to note that sports didn’t begin as serious competitions of physical skills and rivalry, but simply as escapist entertainment.

        The second interesting thing about the word sport is that when it was shortened from disport, it was not broken at the etymological boundary, but in the middle of the prefix.  This is a sort of metanalysis, which you can read more about in my post about The Wandering N.

        Next, the more specific verb meaning “amuse oneself with outdoor exercise” arrived in the late 1400s, and the noun meaning “game involving physical exercise” arrived around 1520.  But the broader meanings of general entertainment and pleasure still continued in use for quite a while.  Although the broader meaning is now mostly obsolete you can still see it in the phrase in sport, meaning “just for fun, joking,”  as well as in the nursery rhyme where “The little dog laughed to see such sport.”  The noun meanings “a person exhibiting good or bad sportsmanship” and “a good fellow, amiable person” are later developments from the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

        Another interesting thing is the subtle difference in usage between British and American English.  Both can talk about a single sport, such as “the sport of football,” or “field hockey is my favorite sport,” and both can talk about the plurality of sports as in “Medals will be awarded in 116 sports at the 2026 Winter Olympics.”  But for the general, uncountable category of athletic activity, British English says “I love watching sport,” while American English says “I love watching sports.”  One can make a logical defense of either version, but it’s really got nothing to do with logic.  For some reason at some point the usage pattern diverged, but for this I can find neither explanation nor dates, I’m very sorry to say.

        So, will you be watching sport or sports this February?  Do you have a favorite sport or do you not care about sport(s) at all?  And if what you really care about is block prints depicting sport(s), check out my prior posts Winter Olympics and Winter Games.

[Picture: Halted, woodcut by Lillian Scalzo, ca. 1935 (Image from Armstrong Fine Art);

Hockey Players, color woodcut by Louis Schanker, 1940 (Image from MoMA).]