WORDSPEAK
Cricket spin-offs
ANAND
WHEN I was a young boy, I once threw a stone at a dark, rich looking object that hung from a tree limb and that was buzzing with activity. What happened next was very similar to writing the last month's "On the Bollywood Beat". Swarms of readers wrote back suggesting names of persons and magazines that could have coined the term. It might take a while to sift through the e-mails and check the references. The jury, therefore, shall continue their lunch break until another column on the origin of Bollywood.
This "Wordspeak" is again about words that catch attention in the Indian media. The Indian cricket team is in Pakistan, and even the front pages of newspapers are full of words like "maiden century" and "maiden over". Certainly a good time for a question that I have often asked but never voiced: how did a word meaning a young unmarried woman, the use of which is sometimes considered offensive, come to be applied to cricket?
The use of maiden for a young woman is considered old-fashioned now. Once it meant, firmly and squarely, a girl, especially for Middle English speakers (circa 1300) because the word "girl" before that had meant "a child of either sex". Thus, a Middle English speaker could say "I am the mother of two girls: a child and a lad" and mean that she has a small girl and a boy. Maiden was shortened to maid and came to be reserved for servants, but still means a girl in compounds such as milkmaid.
Maiden's restricted meaning is "virgin", that is, a woman or a man who has never had sexual intercourse. It is maiden also when it is still in its original, unused, untouched or unexplored condition. In cricket, a maiden over is where no runs are scored or in which the batsman is not able to score. The allusion cannot be mistaken in colloquial or slang usage of score (sexual intercourse). The metaphor behind the ball not being hit for a run is the virgin not being deflowered; since the batsman (only men played cricket until recently) was not able to score, the over has remained a virgin. The reason why its usage has not been branded as sexist is, perhaps, because virgin can be applied to both sexes.
Maiden's other usages are also akin to expressions that imply some kind of preservation or breach of virginity. It is maiden when done for the very first time (maiden voyage, maiden speech), maiden tree (one never lopped), maiden fortress (one never taken), maiden horse (that has never won a race). A virgin's maidenhead is, literally, her girl-ness, just as godhead means "god-ness" or "divinity". But in slang it is also a girl's hymen. Maiden primarily means unspotted, unpolluted, and innocent; thus Hubert says to the king:
"This hand of mine
Is yet a maiden and an innocent hand.
Not painted with the crimson spots of blood."
Shakespeare: King John, iv. 2.
Why is there a "silly" mid-on and "silly" mid-off? Because the fielder is silly to be so close to the batsman that he is at risk of serious injury. When we pitch something somewhere, we throw it with quite a lot of force. Therefore an area of ground that was marked out for pitching the ball came to be called "the pitch". The pitch of a sound is how high or low it is. Cricket's vocabulary borrowed that sense too. Around the time I pitched that stone at the dark, mysterious object, cricket commentator Vizzy used to call a ball "well-pitched" when it bounced at a particular level. And when Sachin Tendulakar is out for a "duck", it is because his score is 0, which looks like a duck's egg.
If cricket borrowed, it loaned too. Spin is a sporting metaphor for the twist given by a bowler that makes the ball "break away" from its apparent trajectory. In North America where baseball is the king, the ball that veers away from the batter is called a "curve" ball, similar to the cricket ball that swings while air-borne. "Throwing a curve (ball)" is an Americanism for deliberately making a misleading statement. A spin-doctor is a cricket-inspired term for politician or an advisor employed to promote a favourable interpretation by putting a slant (a spin) on information.
The question may be asked why an umpire — a word unrelated to any cricket activity — is called so. Umpire came from 14th Century English word "noumpere" which meant "one who decides disputes between parties", which in turn was derived from Old French "nonper" — meaning not a peer, or not equal. The idea was to have an impartial arbitrator as a third party who was not a peer, that is, not equal to either party in dispute.
E-mail the writer at anand@journalist.com
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