Which is the more difficult word: take or encephalomyelitis? Most people would pick the second one – but a lexicographer wouldn’t. For dictionary-writers, words like encephalomyelitis are easy because they only have one meaning, and it can be defined with complete accuracy. The really difficult words are go, take, get, and similar high-frequency items which have dozens of meanings and appear in dozens of phrases. Encephalomyelitis is an example of terminology (what we called ‘sublanguages’ in the first blog of this series). Whatever your professional, academic or recreational interests – from astronomy to zoology – there will be a whole sublanguage that means a great deal to you, and very little to anyone else. Unless you’re in the relevant field, encephalomyelitis is what Donald Rumsfeld would call a ‘known unknown’: you don’t know what it means – but you know that you don’t know it (and you know that you probably don’t need to know it).

The problem arises when a word belonging to a sublanguage doesn’t look like terminology. Most terms used in tennis, for example, are common English words used in specialized ways: break, serve, set – even love. Similarly, grammarians talk about moods, aspects, and cases. This is an important fact about sublanguages: the words don’t always look ‘technical’. It’s the same with cricket. There is plenty of ‘obvious’ terminology: the googly, zooter and yorker, for example, are words for describing different ways of bowling the ball at the batsman. But what about a sentence like this:

Flintoff is on strike, and Ponting has set an attacking field, with two short legs, a silly point, and a man out on the pull at deep third man.

There isn’t a single ‘difficult’ word here, yet the sentence is meaningless if you don’t know the special cricketing uses of almost every word. Take the first phrase here: on strike. Usually this refers to people refusing to work as a form of protest. But in cricket terms, it tells you which batsman is currently being bowled at. (If you know about baseball, it’s like being at bat). Meanwhile, the other team is ‘fielding’ – trying to get their opponents ‘out’ – and a field (which is ‘set’ by the captain) is the particular pattern in which the fielders are arranged around the playing area. An elaborate system of terms allows us to pinpoint an exact spot on a field of several hectares. If a position is described as silly, for example (as in ‘silly point’), it means it is very close to the batsman (it’s a silly place to stand because you risk being hit by the ball when the batsman whacks it).

The cricketer on the right is standing at 'silly mid-off'.

If you are fairly close to the batsman, but not close enough to be ‘silly’, your position is described as short (a ‘short leg’ is on the batsman’s left side). And so it goes on – using common English words for highly specialized purposes.

Finally, there’s a nice connection between love in tennis, and its equivalent in cricket: a batsman who fails to score any runs is said to be out for a duck. This comes from the expression ‘a duck’s egg’, whose shape resembles a zero. And tennis has its ‘egg’ too: the term love comes from the French ‘l’oeuf’. Next time, we’ll look at the various mechanisms by which a word, starting with one basic meaning, can gradually acquire additional senses like the ones we’ve discussed here.

First, a little history to set the scene. We think of cricket as a very ‘English’ game, and nowadays it’s mainly played in parts of the former British empire: Australasia, the Indian subcontinent, South Africa, and the Caribbean. But its history is more complex. In a recent novel, Netherland, the protagonist is a Wall Street trader who plays for a cricket club in the unlikely setting of New York City. We learn that ‘cricket was the first modern team sport in America’ and had been played there since the 1770s – declining in popularity only from the start of the 20th century.

The protagonist, Hans van den Broek, had grown up playing cricket in the Netherlands, where the game still has a reasonable following. By an odd coincidence, just months after Netherland was published, the world of cricket was rocked by the discovery that the game may have originated not (as we always thought) in the sheep fields of Kent and Sussex, but in Flanders – close to van den Broek’s homeland. The theory is that cricket was brought to England by Flemish weavers in the early 16th century, and the evidence for this is linguistic: the word cricket is now thought to be related to the Middle Flemish word krick, a staff or stick for leaning on – this being the object with which the ball was hit in an early version of the game. (Krick is also related to English words like crook – sense 3 in the Macmillan Dictionary – and crutch.) As in general English, a high percentage of cricket’s vocabulary has Germanic roots, and this is especially true of some of the game’s oldest terms.

It’s probably worth explaining the rudiments of the game at this stage. The two principal contenders are a bowler and batsman: the bowler hurls a ball towards the batsman, who is holding a bat (an implement for hitting the ball) and standing in front of a target called a wicket. The bowler’s aim is either to hit the wicket with the ball, or to get the batsman to hit the ball in the air – if the wicket is hit, or if the bowler or one of his teammates catches the airborne ball, that’s the end of the batsman: he is then said to be out (and until he is out, he is in). The batsman’s aim, on the other hand, is to stay in (by successfully guarding his wicket), and if possible to score points (called runs) by hitting the ball far enough to enable him to run from one end of the pitch to the other before anyone retrieves the ball. Simple!

The names of the basic actors and implements in cricket tell us a lot about its origins. The word wicket originally meant a small gate, for example on a sheep pen, and in the early days of cricket these gates would have been a good target for throwing the ball at. The modern wicket consists of three upright poles placed close together: these are called stumps – a vestige of an even earlier stage in which the target to aim at was a tree stump. We also talk about bowling the ball – even though it is thrown with an overarm action: again, this harks back to a time when the cricket ball was literally ‘bowled’ along the ground (as in tenpin bowling). And in many sports we refer to players scoring points, because in the early days of cricket, the batsman’s runs were counted by cutting (or ‘scoring’) marks into a piece of wood (see sense 3 of the verb score in the Macmillan Dictionary).

As in cricket, so in the language as a whole, the vocabulary we use today often started out meaning something else but has left traces of its earlier uses. The word meat, for example, is over a thousand years old, but it originally meant food of any kind. Though that meaning has disappeared from modern English, traces of it survive in phrases we still use: we say that something is meat and drink to someone or that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Or think of a word like loophole, which started life as the name for one of those narrow slits in a castle wall which arrows are fired through. When we ‘exploit a loophole’ (in a law or contract, for example), we find a ‘narrow opening’ that offers a means of avoiding a problem.

These are all aspects of language change, and are a good introduction to the notion of ‘polysemy’ – the fact that one word can develop several meanings – which we will explore in the next blog of this series.

Read part 1 or part 3.

Cricket is the most quintessentially English game, but is famously incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been brought up with it. (The phrase in the title here makes perfect sense to an aficionado of the game but could easily be misinterpreted by anyone else.) George W. Bush – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – thought cricket “looks a bit like polo and baseball combined, only without the horses”. Hmmm … not quite, George.

One of the things that puts people off cricket is its apparently unfathomable vocabulary. But the language of cricket is just one of thousands of “sublanguages” in English, and like most aspects of language it has its own logic. Once you have cracked the system, it all becomes much clearer … and anyone learning any language will find it much easier if they understand some underlying “rules” about how language works.

So the idea here is not to indoctrinate readers into the language of cricket, but to use this as a medium to explore how language functions at a more general level. Cricketspeak is a microcosm of the English language, and of language per se. Think of a language as consisting of, first, a central core – the common vocabulary we need for any and every form of written or spoken communication – then, an infinite number of sublanguages, such as the terminology used by beekeepers, oncologists, online gamers, or language-teachers. Sublanguages tend to embody most of the features of a language system, so by learning about one particular sublanguage you can actually learn a lot about language in general.

That’s the premise behind this short series of blogs, which will show how most linguistic concepts can be explained and illustrated through the language of cricket. Future blogs in the series will look at concepts such as:

• word-formation: for example, how we often take English nouns and turn them into verbs (have you Facebooked anyone recently?)
• figurative language: metaphor, metonymy and similar processes are pervasive in all languages – and they have a key role in the way we attach meanings to words. These concepts can all be illustrated through the vocabulary of cricket.
• terminology: every sublanguage has its distinct terminology, and cricket – with terms like googly, yorker and doosra – is no exception.
• polysemy: how common words develop new and often specialised meanings: when we say a cricketer is on strike this has nothing to do with refusing to work, as we’ll see later. Most of cricket’s vocabulary is based not on obscure terms, but on very ordinary words (like the ones in the title above) that have taken on new meanings. Rabbit, duck, and lobster, for example, all have special meanings for cricket fans.
• gender, class and other sociolinguistic issues: like any other activity, cricket is played in a changing world, and its language reflects these changes.
• regional variation: how the same concept can have different names depending on where you are. Cricket started in England (well, probably – more on that in the next posting) but has spread to many parts of the world, and different speech communities have their own take on the language. There’s an incident in the movie Slumdog Millionaire where the kids are chased off a patch of private land where they’re playing cricket: the game’s epicentre is no longer the UK, but India – and this has implications for the language too.
• wordplay: this is a feature of language worldwide, and cricketspeak has plenty of examples.
• language change: everywhere in the language, older words fall out of use and new ones come along – but what are the mechanisms by which these things happen? Exploring obsolescence and neologism in cricket will help to reveal the rules behind these processes.

These are some of the topics we’ll look at in coming blogs. The principle behind all this is a belief that language is almost never random: the way it works and the way it develops tends to be governed by systems – some of which are mentioned above. These systems aren’t always easy to pick out among the idiosyncrasies of real communication, but they’re always lurking in the background. The more we understand about them, the better equipped we’ll be to teach, learn, and use languages – and cricket is as good a medium as any for this kind of exploration. Watch this space.

Read part 2 here.