10 Words for Lesser-Known Games and Sports
Are you ready for some stoolball?
Definition:
: the sport of logrolling, in which a person tries to retain their balance while standing on and rotating a floating log with their feet and while trying at the same time to dislodge usually a single competitor on the same log
Background:
To birl something is to cause it to spin or rotate. You can birl a coin on a table, for example, if the mood strikes you. If you’re looking for even more thrills, you can birl a floating log by treading on it, which is a task that log drivers are charged with to get them downstream to the mill. Not content to birl for their occupation, log drivers decided at some point in the indeterminate past to let birling roll into their lives off-the-clock.
Example:
Enthusiasts are trying to get the sport rolling again. Here and there, colleges are introducing recreational birling. And in the past two years, Abby Hoeschler says, more than 100 summer camps and more than 30 community aquatics programs have added logrolling to their offerings.
— Linton Weeks, NPR, 3 Feb. 2015
Definition:
: an old sport of throwing sticks at a cock tied to a stake popular especially at Shrovetide
Background:
There’s a reason our unabridged dictionary defines cockthrowing as an “old” sport: no one does this anymore. Which is to say, don’t do this. Throwing sticks at a cock tied to a stake is, understandably, now frowned upon, at Shrovetide or any time of year.
Example:
If beasts and humans are all created in accordance with the same divine plan, must we extend the same degree of compassion to all the rest of animal creation—not just to horses and sheep, but to fish and insects, too? An anonymous clergyman made this point in a Shrovetide sermon attacking cockthrowing, published in 1761…
— Kathryn Shevelow, For the Love of Animals (Henry Holt and Company, 2009)
Definition
: the sport of shooting rapids and cruising on swift water in a foldboat
Background:
A foldboat, sometimes also called a faltboat, is a small collapsible canoe made of rubberized sailcloth stretched over a framework. The name given to the sport of foldboating, therefore, is very understandable. However, foldboating enthusiasts could have chosen to keep the original German word for the watercraft, Faltboot, rather than translating it, and then we’d likely be a nation of faltbooters, not foldboaters.
Example:
Taking week-end outings with a collapsible boat for paddling about in lakes and rivers is one of America’s fastest growing sports, known as foldboating. As evidence of its popularity, special trains running out of New York City accommodate foldboaters who do not drive their own cars. The boats, when folded, can be stowed within an automobile or carried on a train as easily as hand luggage.
— Popular Mechanics, October 1941
Dictionary:
: an ancient board game regarded as a precursor to checkers in which two players each having twelve pieces begin play with their pieces arranged on a board five spaces wide and five spaces deep with one open space in the middle
Background:
Alquerque is indeed an ancient game, but alquerque did not enter English until the late 19th century as a borrowing from Spanish, which in turn adapted it from the Arabic word for the game, a combination of al (“the”) and qirq.
Example:
Draughts were invented about 1100, probably in the south of France, by using backgammon pieces on a chessboard with the moves of alquerque.
— R. C. Bell, Board and Table Game Antiques (Bloomsbury, 1981)
Definition:
: an old British group game in which one couple or player stationed in a defined area called “hell” or the “barley field” tries to catch the others as they venture into it
Background:
The 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica noted, in its entry for the game of barleybreak, or barley-break, that it was “frequently mentioned by the poets of the 17th and 18th centuries.” This may be because barleybreak, like so many such games, is ripe for metaphor. To wit: “The couple occupying the middle base, called hell or prison, endeavoured to catch the other two, who, when chased, might break to avoid being caught. If one was overtaken, he and his companion were condemned to hell. From this game was taken the expression ‘the last couple in hell,’ often used in old plays.” Fun!
Example:
George Page now came towards them to say that a game of Barleybreak had been proposed; that the dancers were dispersing, and that the sport was about to commence in the home-paddock.
— Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines in a Series of Tales (A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1881)
Definition:
: the sport of sailing in cold weather
Background:
You may, hopefully not from experience with the condition, be familiar with frostbite as a noun referring to the freezing, whether superficial or deep, of bodily tissues—especially of one’s feet or hands. But before frostbite was a noun, it was a verb meaning “to affect or injure by frost or frostbite.” We still encounter this verb often, but usually as the participles frostbit and frostbitten. The most recent addition to frostbite’s part-of-speech portfolio is the adjective, meaning “done in cold weather” (as in “frostbite sailing”), which was first recorded in the early 1940s. Want a single word for “frostbite sailing,” you know, for brevity and whatnot? Here you go: frostbiting. Now get out there (and don’t forget your mittens and balaclava).
Example:
“There are lots of fancy ideas about the motivation for starting frostbiting,” says Knapp. “But I say it’s simple. The motivation was gin.”
— Time, 15 Feb. 1960
Definition:
: a winter sport in which a person wearing skis is drawn over snow or ice (as by a horse or vehicle)
Background:
As we did with cockthrowing, we’re going to momentarily pause our impartiality and say that as far as winter sports go, skijoring sounds far, far preferable to frostbiting, even if it still runs the risk of frostbite. The reason? Corgis. Now that we’ve learned, from the reference cited below, that “Corgis have been known to excel in skijoring,” we can hardly think of anything else but to order some skis and get on with it. Corgis! Skijoring first entered English at the start of the 20th century, a modification of the Norwegian word skikjøring, which combines ski and kjøring (“driving”).
Example:
Even diminutive Corgis have been known to excel in skijoring. Although the Nordic breeds rarely develop the hard packs of ice that catch in the hair between toe pads and often cause frostbite, it is common for most other breeds, so be sure these dogs always wear snow booties when running.
— The Original Dog Bible: The Definitive Source for All Things Dog, Kristin Mehus-Roe, ed. (Fox Chapel Publishing, 2011)
Definition:
: an ancient Cretan sport in which a performer grasps the horns of a bull and somersaults over him
About the Word:
This sport can’t be more difficult to partake in than it is to say, right? Right? Taurokathapsia comes from—you guessed it—Greek, a combination of tauros (“bull”) and kathaptos, a form of kathaptein, meaning “to fasten upon” or “to attack.”
Example:
In a fresco of the Taurokathapsia, the bull game of Crete, the participating young men and women run directly at the bull, seize its long horns and somersault over its back.
— Buffie Johnson, Lady of the Beasts: The Goddess and Her Sacred Animals (Inner Traditions, 1994)
Definition:
: a game in which one player using a bat strikes lightly a tapered wooden peg and as it flies up strikes it again to drive it as far as possible while fielders try to recover it; also : the peg used in this game
About the Word
As one soon learns when digging into the lore surrounding tipcat, sometimes styled “tip-cat,” myriad variations on this form of trapball have been played all around the world under various names probably since time immemorial—our unabridged dictionary even has an entry for tip cheese, referring to a children’s game “resembling tipcat.” We can only assume that cheese is less prone to scratching upon being tipped.
Examples:
The well-known old English game of Tipcat is but a modification of this [a game called “Northen Spell” or “Knur and Spell”], the cat being a piece of wood pointed at both ends into the shape of a double cone, doubtless an ingenious rustic contrivance to obviate the use of the trap and ball.
— Frederick W. Hackwood, Old English Sports (Brentano’s, 1907)
Definition:
: an old English game resembling cricket
About the Word:
We’ll be clear right off the bat (cough): for the inquiring minds that want to know, the stool in stoolball refers to a milking stool, not... any other kind of stool. As noted in our definition, stoolball, which is still played especially in southeastern England, is similar to cricket, and it believed that early stoolball players—namely milkmaids—used their stools as wickets and their milk bowls as bats. Stoolball is also similar to a game more familiar in the States: stickball.
Example:
The young folks, smiling, kiss at every turn in the dance; the old folk sit about talking and laughing; the children dance for a garland or play at stoolball for a tansey and a banquet of curds and cream.
— Charles Morrow Wilson, The Atlantic Monthly, August 1929
