As a card-carrying member of the word nerd club, I can report that English has long been hooked on card games. Whether we hold the upper hand, pass the buck or offer a bargaining chip, our deck is stacked with table talk. Stacked in spades, with recent years only upping the ante.
Blame Trump, I guess. But that’s too simple a game, though trump (the verb) is Exhibit A, a corruption of triumph. Or triomphe in fact, a la the Parisian arch. A popular trick-taking game, triomphe is the forebear of euchre. The pastime fostered the idea of a trump card being your winning edge, the deal-clincher. Grand as that sounds, I love how NZ slang during WWI called anyone in authority, typically a cocky middle manager, as trump of the dump.
Staying with US politics, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal offered a clean slate of social and economic reforms where tax revenue was above board – a further card-game borrowing. Despite that, any new deal will leave some citizens in the lurch, a phrase from cribbage. Lurch refers to an emphatic win where you “street” your opponent by more than twice their score. (Bear in mind that street is the column of peg-holes on a cribbage board, and nothing to do with Pennsylvania Avenue.) As for lurch, dictionary sleuth Michael Quinion suspects “lurz werden” to be the source, the German phrase meaning to become short.
At the stadium, table games and sport also meld, another verb drawn from the pack, canasta this time. In tennis, the US Open wraps the calendar of grand slams – a term via the bridge club. Just as we’re entering showdown season in football. And yes, showdown is another casino legacy. Poker on this occasion, when all the bluff and bluster is done, the stakes are high, demanding all players to lay down their hands, the showdown a sort of facing up.
All games, of course, must be played according to Hoyle, the original stickler for due process who published a whist manual in 1742, followed by A Short Treatise on Backgammon. Though many AFL fans are still pondering why their code followed suit of baseball and gridiron by introducing wildcards in September.
Presuming Collingwood and Carlton even qualified for the American term, let alone the finals proper. Falling short of the traditional cut-off, where the top-eight model tends to snub teams coming ninth and tenth, the so-called wildcards seem more hard-luck stories redeemed rather than invitees “from organisers to join a tournament or playoff berth” as per Wikipedia. According to whom? Not Hoyle, surely.
I get the value of packing the MCG for two bonus “games of consequence”, to quote AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon, wresting back the free weekend NRL once monopolised. Just as there’s merit in prolonging the hopes and aches of fans, speaking as a Kangaroos tragic dealing with a losing hand for most of August. But wildcards? As much as English adores cards, let’s call a spade a spade. The rummy import is a euphemism for also-ran, and next year – if the chips are down – I trust North Melbourne can somehow earn a place at the table rather than being left in the lurch.
David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.
