Bowlmenclature

Where does "Super Bowl" come from? The late Lamar Hunt, one of the most interesting of all pro sports owners. Here's the story from his New York Times obit about three years ago:

In 1966, the N.F.L. and the A.F.L. agreed to merge. In the negotiations, Hunt had a leading role representing his league and Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ general manager, did the same for the N.F.L. Although the leagues would not formally merge until 1970, they planned a championship game, to be held after the 1966 season. Hunt’s Chiefs lost to the Green Bay Packers in that January 1967 game that became known as the first Super Bowl.

Hunt recalled that in the discussion of playoff games, “the words flowed something like this: ‘No, not those games — the one I mean is the final game. You know, the Super Bowl.’”

He added: “My own feeling is that it probably registered in my head because my daughter, Sharron, and my son Lamar Jr. had a children’s toy called a Super Ball, and I probably interchanged the phonetics of ‘bowl’ and ‘ball.’”

But the first two games had a less compelling title: the A.F.L.-N.F.L. World Championship Game. After two years, Hunt’s Super Bowl interjection became the name of the game. Then, in a note to N.F.L. Commissioner Pete Rozelle, Hunt had the whimsical thought that Roman numerals gave the game “more dignity.” After the third Super Bowl, Roman numerals were grandfathered in.

Just savor the idea of "dignity" alongside the wardrobe malfunction, Up With People and Ray Lewis' poor taste in friends.

Even in 1966, "bowl game" had been around forever (taken from the Rose Bowl, event, played at the Rose Bowl, stadium). There's an even older and more figurative usage of "bowl" as general "drinking" and "conviviality" (OED) that's just as fitting for the only bowl game in football whose site changes all the time.

Linkery

• "The literary classic that inspired the epic video game." Find out who's responsible, and guess which circle of the Inferno they'll find themselves in.

• Spokespirate.

• "You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust, by sweeping away your little words." That's love among the poets.

• And last, Regret the Error belatedly joins the J.D. Salinger tribute tour.

I'm against singling out editors in corrections. I may be particularly sensitive as an editor. But a story passes through a lot of people before it gets into print, and they're all responsible for getting it right.

It's really hard to understand making the error in the link, though.

Notherlover

A reader urges: "'A whole nother.' Discuss. Hopefully with irate passion."

You wouldn't be scandalized if I said it's virtually impossible to make "a whole nother" work in formal writing, right? What if I told you there was the tiniest, most fleeting chance it was actually legitimate?

"A whole nother," which has been around for more than a century, is caught halfway between two theories. One says it was created through a form of infixation, which is stuffing one word into another, often for emphasis ("un-fucking-believable!"). I think this emphasis helps explain why "a whole nother" has made a beach-head against "a whole other," which is grammatically unassailable but strikes me as effete without that "n."

In the other theory, AWN is a colloquial remnant of "a nother," which is how some people said "an other" and "another" in the time before dictionaries (this phenomenon is why "newt" begins with a consonant today and "apron" doesn't, to use two well-worn examples).

The earliest use I can find is, naturally, no help. To 1890, and "The Mysterious Guide" by Mrs. Molesworth: "'Will the fog be gone by to-morrow morning?' said Patty, disconsolately. 'I don't know what we shall do if we have to be a whole 'nother day in the house and in the dark.'"

Molesworth tries to class it up with an apostrophe, just as writers sometimes do today. For that reason, I'm tempted to say this is close enough to an infix. On the other hand, the apostrophe also means it's a freestanding word. And the "other" "nother," while somewhat out of currency in the late 19th century, was hardly unknown.

OK. There's academic exercise and there's arrant geekery, and the fact that I can't see the line in front of me only means I've crossed it. I didn't really want to guess at a theory, I just wanted to stick up for AWN. A pitiable little colloquialism, sure -- but it's survived more than a century in the face of a widely preferred substitute, and that's kinda cool.

But just for closure: Bill Safire called it an infix, and he didn't hide "nother" behind the fig leaf of an apostrophe. I don't know that he's right, but he'll get the last word.

iPad, etc.

Nancy Friedman, who always has interesting things to write about naming and branding, doesn't seem terribly impressed with "iPad." Me neither. Maybe if Apple didn't already have a product with a basically identical name ...

Other midweek links:

• Woody Allen's mind-bending powers of sentence construction.

• How the copy desk got that way, and why we're doomed (YMMV), by David Sullivan. There's a lot being written now on why slashing copy desks is a bad idea, but Sullivan explains why the people who make these decisions don't understand why you can't just replace us with spellcheck.

• Mark Peters on brand names going generic.

• A quick but fun word game (h/t Talk Wordy To Me).

• And last, from this morning's Washington Post: "On New Year's Eve, conservative activist James O'Keefe telegraphed across the Internet that he was up to something big."

Yes, the writer used "telegraphed" correctly. No, sometimes that doesn't matter. This was my note of perspective for the day when I read it on the bus, and it's a good place to leave things this evening.

(UPDATED, 8:34 p.m. on Jan. 29) I'm way more torn about "telegraphed across the Internet" than I thought I'd be. CONS: It's gratuitous; there are shorter, cleaner ways to write that lede; if it is a joke, it's not sold very well. PROS: English is a strange little language, and we ought to celebrate that instead of diminishing it. So this gag didn't work -- the next one might, and I don't want to discourage the attempt.

You make the call.

Precriminations

Atlantic Wire headline from Tuesday morning: "Precriminations: Dems, Expecting Loss, Lay Into Coakley."

Assigning blame for a loss that's yet to happen -- truly a concept for our times.

To begin where a lot of people have: "Precriminations" was popularized by a Dana Milbank piece in the Washington Post in February 2006 predicting whom Democrats were going to blame if they botched the midterm elections. By October, the Republicans had done a good bit of botching themselves and began their own precriminating. And a term that now seems inevitable had begun to circulate.

Milbank is sometimes credited with coining the word, but it predates him. In October 2004, the New Republic appears to have used it in a pair of online pieces speculating on whom each party would cannibalize if it lost the presidential election. I say "appears" because I have to rely on the word of these blogs; the links to TNR's Web site are dead. Fortunately, we have an even earlier mention: James Fallows, writing about the last days of the Bush-Gore race for The Atlantic's Web site in November 2000, calls it "Michael Kinsley's term." But my trail ends there; if Kinsley or anyone else used the word in public before 2000, I can't find it.

"Precriminations" isn't exactly a new concept -- infighting and finger-pointing go back forever in politics. And it shares more than a little with "pre-mortem," whose political use (as opposed to medical use) goes back decades. But holding a carnival of blame before the polls have even opened seems perfect for a 24/7 political culture where someone's always talking, predictions are mistaken for actualities, and you've got to get the stench of failure off you before the next election.

The earliest political use of "pre-mortem" I could find is the headline of an H.L. Mencken column for the Baltimore Evening Sun in October 1932. Herbert Hoover was about to get crushed by FDR, and Mencken summed up the mood among Republican solons: "The Republican grand goblins, having given up hope of reelecting Lord Hoover on November 8, now devote themselves con amore to concocting what, on less exalted levels, would be called his alibi. He will go to the block, they say, as a sacrifice to the public's notorious incapacity for cerebral functioning. He will be butchered at the polls, brutally, melodramatically and against all justice and reason, because it blames him for the Depression, and pants to punish him."

There is always bipartisan support for blaming the voters.

Anyway, if we're going to draw a line between pre-mortems and precriminations when they involve party officials, Mencken's column provides a useful contrast with the other examples quoted above. The Republican leaders of 1932 decided voters weren't buying, but they still took care not to damage the merchandise.

Midweek reading

• Talking on the phone might be messing with your head. "One recent study interviewed pedestrians who had just walked along a 375-foot path across an open plaza where a clown on a unicycle was riding around. Only 2 out of 24 cell phone users reported seeing the clown." I guess this is why I feel the need to give people play-by-play when I'm on the phone with them in the car.

• Call Abdulmutallab the Undiebomber. Interesting, especially for those who feel society needs to bury the psychopath mystique.

• Where love-light comes from.

• Stop using being verbs.

• This doesn't have much to do with language, but here's what the guy who dubbed Gilbert Arenas "Agent Zero" thinks about that whole mess.

• Semicolons in civil service.

(Just like) starting over

One of the things I get out of this blog is that when I feel like venting about one of my pet peeves, I have to figure out if it's really a crime against the English language or if I just don't like it.

So it was during the NFL playoffs this weekend, when we heard again how the Saints and Colts started the season 13-0 and 14-0, respectively. That's always bugged me -- talking about a "start" when the teams involved are closer to golf than training camp. In 2007, you could even find references to the Patriots starting the season 15-0 -- when the end was one game away.

The thing is, when I played devil's advocate, I had to admit it had a stronger -- and more interesting -- case than I expected.

• It is literally true that the Saints started the season 13-0. It's unwise to complain about expressions that are literally true.

• The alternatives don't exactly sing. The Saints won their first 13 games. They were undefeated through 13 games. They were 13-0 at one point. Any others?

• The people who say it know the deal. After Week 14, football fans might have said the Saints were off to a 13-0 start, but nobody said the Giants were off to a 7-6 start. That's because those people weren't really talking about a beginning, they were talking about a season-long trend. The Giants started the season 5-0, and then that trend was broken (painfully).

If you're curious, the theory seems to hold up for other sports, too. I did a quick and dirty study of the New York Times from 2000 to 2009 to see how deep into the regular season they would use the phrase "started the season" in combination with a team's record. The results: For the NFL, 12 games (75% of the season). For college basketball, 19 games (68%). For the NBA, 35 games (43%). For baseball, 54 games (33%). The shorter the season, the higher the percentage.

Makes sense to me. In the NFL, 12 games may be most of the season, but 12 is a small number. A first-grader can count that high. It's probably more natural for people to associate that with a beginning than an end if there's a trend there.

What about the NHL, which is missing above? That's the exception that proves the rule, because of OT losses and standings points -- it's harder to see a trend at a glance. The longest "start" in hockey was just 18 games (22%).

I admit this isn't the usage problem I imagined. I'm going to make my peace with it. And I've learned something. I'd like to think I learned to stay open-minded about things that rub me the wrong way. Maybe even that the Internet can be a tool of understanding as well as divisiveness. But really, I learned that it's one of life's little pleasures to be able to hate something with justification, and you should never cheapen that pleasure by being a lazy hater.