Playing It Straight and Catching a Break

It’s easy to forget how many of our day-to-day expressions have entered the language from sports and games. We encourage someone by telling them to “knock it out of the park,” we’re “blindsided” by an unexpected event, and we acknowledge we “dropped the ball” when we messed up on a project. We try to “play our cards right,” make sure we don’t get trapped “in the weeds,” and keep going when we’re on the “home stretch.” And it’s perhaps unsurprising that a lot of these expressions come from activities of gambling and luck—one can be “dealt a bad hand” when put in an unfortunate situation or be faced with a “roll of the dice” and an uncertain outcome.

One perhaps less-expected source of a range of these terms is the billiard hall. As English scholar Robert R. Craven writes in American Speech, many well-assimilated expressions come from billiards, “a game that the public does not follow with the same attention it gives to baseball, football, or other sporting sources of colloquialisms. Surprising, too, is the absence of stigma attached to most borrowings from the jargon of a game long infamous for its clientele of hustlers and underworld inhabitants.”

Studying origins of common phrases through various dictionaries, Craven found that billiards (and related cue games, snooker and pool) has given us:

• “Know the angles” (understand the subtleties and machinations of something; be generally capable)
• Break—in the sense of “bad break”, “good break”, “those are the breaks”, and possibly even “big break” (occurrence of chance, good or bad)
• “Dirty pool” (unethical practices)
• “Behind the eight ball” (at a disadvantage, in a tough position)
• To “snooker” someone (to trick them)
• “Call the shots,” from the rule that players must audibly name which ball they intend to sink before taking the shot (be in charge, predict)
• “Fluke” (chance occurrence, usually to the positive)

As Craven notes, some of these terms have moved, as have some from cards or other sports, into daily use, completely divorced from their origin. He also writes that several phrases, “such as behind the eightball [sic] and call the shots…seem somewhere between emergence and assimilation. They retain their origins and yet are widely used in general discourse; they are metaphorical.”

Cue games rose to popularity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and soon spread to the rest of the English-speaking world. But their popularity dropped off during the twentieth century. According to Craven, billiards lost ground after the First World War, and pool, which offers a smaller table and simpler gameplay, by the Depression. The number of pool halls in the United States dropped from 40,000 to 8,000 between 1929 and 1939.

“Tournament play became sporadic,” he writes,

the middle-class dabbler disappeared, and, with the exception of the elite clubs, pool rooms became increasingly the haunts of the down-and-out, chronic gamblers, and other social outcasts. However, with the startling success of the 1961 movie version of Walter Tevis’s novel The Hustler (1959), there was a remarkable revival in the popularity of pool. Many thousands of new poolrooms opened, their decor and atmosphere designed to attract the burgeoning middle-class entertainment market.

Seeing Paul Newman as “Fast Eddie” Felson playing it on the big screen made pool cool and accordingly thrust a new collection of pool phrases into the everyday lexicon.

In recent decades, the number of pool venues in the US has dropped again, to an estimated 836 (although this doesn’t include bars and hotels that have pool tables. Nor does it include the pool tables in suburban rec rooms and basements across the country). Yet in the English language, eight balls, magic or otherwise, are here to stay.

---

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.

The post Playing It Straight and Catching a Break appeared first on JSTOR Daily.