I’ve been trying to be efficient this week. You know, tackle things straight away, before they start to become a burden. This morning, for example, I woke up all excited and keen to write Word of the Week because I had my word all ready to go: Vertigo.
My friend Karen had sent me a picture of her about to walk over the top of the Millennium Dome, which I quite fancy doing although I reckon it would scare me. Actually, it’s not heights I’m afraid of, it’s falling off them, as I was reminded this week while watching Mission Impossible – the one where Tom Cruise climbs up the outside of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai using a pair of sticky mitts.
As I was pacing around the room, trying not to look but having to look – yeah, go on, laugh if you must – I remembered that this gut-churning torture I was feeling isn’t actually called vertigo, even though everyone calls it that. So I thought I should write about it. But then I discovered that I’d already written about it in 2018 under the word Phobia.
Never mind, I thought, I’ve got another word up my sleeve. Lie. There’s been a lot of talk about lies lately, so I thought it would be interesting to explore the morality of lying and the scale of severity that we judge them by, from lies of State like “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and “All guidance was followed completely at No.10” to everyday fibs like “We’re experiencing very high call volumes at the moment”. (Do they think we’re stupid?)
But then I found I did the word Fib back in 2018. “Stymied,” I thought. “What on earth am I going to write about now?”
I had somehow got caught up in a vortex in the space-time continuum and was reliving the year 2018. Before England got knocked out of the World Cup by Croatia again, I needed to come up with a word that would buy me time, a word that would untie me, nothing grimy or slimy, but maybe something rhymey. Then it came to me in a blinding flash.
Stymie, meaning to hinder or prevent the progress of, is a term that originated in golf in the 1700s, perhaps from the Scottish word ‘stymie’, meaning someone who doesn’t see clearly. (It says ‘perhaps’ in etymonline but I would say there’s more than a fair chance, wouldn’t you?) Until 1952, you could snooker (a term that originated in snooker) your opponent on the putting green by hitting your ball to a spot between their ball and the hole. They had to then play their ball around yours, or over it. Here’s some footage of golfers doing it in 1948.
It seems a shame the rule doesn’t still exist. Given the animosity in the game at the moment, a rule that enables the players to really wind each other up could be dynamite.
Next week: the origin of the word ‘dynamite’.
