Bogey, birdie, dormie, caddie, niblick… If you like silly words (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?), you’ll find rich pickings around this time of the year when The Open golf tournament awakens from its annual slumber, opens one languid eye, swallows someone whole and nods off again.
Funny game, golf. Like Marmite, Brexit and heroin, you either adore it or revile it. There seem to be no half measures. But whichever camp you stand in, you have to admit it is a game resplendent with silliness and we should all be thankful for that. As Robert the Bruce once said while trying to smuggle his wife into the Members’ Bar at Muirfield, “You can’t blame the game for the social customs that surround it.”
Golf has graced humanity with a unique platform for exercise, fun, social interaction, friendly competition, bitter rivalry, self-loathing and tormented introspection, sometimes all within the same shot. Were it not for the golden thread of silliness that binds it all together, golf would probably have destroyed us by now.
Why?
Because it’s addictive, that’s why. And it’s addictive because it’s difficult. Compared to other sporting skills, such as bowling a cricket ball, kicking a football or rolling a large cheese downhill, hitting a small ball with a thin slice of metal glued to the end of a long stick is about as challenging, skill wise, as anything the world of sport has ever come up with. Not surprisingly, it drives you mad. But get it right and you feel like a king. Or a queen. Just ask Mary Queen of Scots. One good chip on the 17th at St Andrews and she thought she was the Queen of England!
Mary was a big fan of golf and you’ll often see her credited with having coined some of the game’s colourful vocabulary. There’s a grain of plausibility to this theory for two reasons:
1. She was Scottish.
2. She was French.
Two disparate cultures united by a common antipathy towards the English. Bring them together and strange and wonderful things occur – things like marmalade and the language of golf. ‘Caddie’ comes from the French ‘cadet’ (a young soldier), ‘dormie’ from the French ‘dormir’ (to sleep) and ‘niblick’ from the French ‘n’oblique’ (not shanked sideways into the thistles) – a definition which might very well have been made up.
Just now.
It’s just struck me that if you have no interest in golf, this whole article so far will have read like a nonsense poem. But that’s golf for you: sometimes it can leave you feeling like you’ve just gone 10 rounds with Hilaire Belloc. Yet it keeps you coming back for more because there’s always that sense that gratification is just around the corner. As President Ford once said, “I know I’m getting better at golf because I’m hitting fewer spectators.”
Fore!
