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.