Recent articles in the U-T and Sports Illustrated detail how pickleball has become the rage in San Diego and across our fair land. A quarter-size version of tennis, greatly influenced by badminton, ping-pong, and Wiffle ball, pickleball is wildly popular at my club in Scripps Ranch. During set times for open play here, 32 pickleballers flock to our eight courts.
The game started during the summer of 1965 on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle, Wash. Then State Representative Joel Pritchard and two of his friends — Bill Bell and Barney McCallum — returned from golf one Saturday afternoon and found their families bored with the usual summertime activities. They tried to set up badminton, but no one could find the shuttlecock. So they improvised with a Wiffle ball, lowered the badminton net, and fabricated paddles of plywood from a nearby shed.
According to Joan Pritchard, Joel’s wife, the name of the sport came “after I said it reminded me of the Pickle Boat in crew, where oarsmen were chosen from the leftovers of other boats. Somehow the idea the name came from our dog Pickles was attached to the naming of the game, but Pickles wasn’t on the scene for two more years. The dog was named for the game.”
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When I was a boy, I read The Wizard of Oz and wondered how someone could talk if they didn’t have a brain. Then I went on Facebook and found out. It’s been said that a million monkeys typing away on computers would eventually create a literary masterpiece like Hamlet. I know that’s not true because I’ve been on Facebook.
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About 100 years ago, when alarm clocks were expensive and unreliable, professional knocker uppers (generally women) were people entrusted to wake up workers. They earned about six pence a week shooting dried peas out of peashooters at the windows of sleeping workers in East London. The knocker uppers would not move on until they were certain that the laborer had awakened.
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People always call me a walking dictionary. I thought they meant I was smart with a good vocabulary, but, apparently, I’m just thick. Building a strong vocabulary is important in life, so today I’m teaching you the word plethora. It means a lot. I’m less in love with the word dearth. It means very little to me.
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The ability to speak several languages is a valuable asset, but the ability to keep your mouth shut in any language is priceless.
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Have you ever noticed that queue is just a q followed by a column of silent letters standing in line?
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I believe that the poet T.S. Eliot included his middle initial to avoid people like me pointing out that T. Eliot spelled backwards is toilet. Speaking of spelling a word backwards, when you feel stressed, feel free to consume desserts.
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If you mix up the letters of MAILMEN, they get really upset.
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A rhopalic is a sentence in which each word is progressively one letter or one syllable longer than its predecessor. This word derives from the Greek rhopalos, for a club or cudgel, thicker toward one end than the other.
From the great Dmitri Borgmann, here’s a rhopalic sentence in which each word adds a letter: O to see man’s stern, poetic thought publicly expanding recklessly imaginative mathematical inventiveness, openmindedness unconditionally superfecundating nonantagonistical, hypersophisticated, interdenominational interpenetrabilities.
Here’s my original rhopalic, in which each word adds a syllable: I never totally misinterpret administrative, idiosyncratic, uncategorizable, overintellectualized deinstitutionalization.
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A number of readers have enriched my list of second-hand suffixes, especially -gate, which has come to signify “a scandal.” Their suggestions include Watergate, the break-in that happened just a little more than 50 years ago; deflategate, the 2015 accusation against Tom Brady and the New England Patriots; tailgate, in which U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aviation officers were accused of improper sexual behavior; and, of course, slapgate, the staggering incident in this year’s Oscars ceremony.