The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Amateur Lovers

The opposite of meretricious can be found hidden away in the game of tennis, where the true nature of love can also be discovered. But first, a brief note on the word tennis. It’s not called that, you know. The proper term for the game played at Wimbledon is sphairistike.

The rules of tennis as we know them were set down by a man called Major Walton Clopton Wingfield back in the 1890s. Tennis had been played before, of course – Shakespeare refers to the game several times – but it had always been played by kings and princes in the courtyards of palaces. It wasn’t until the invention of the lawnmower in the nineteenth century that people were able to play on lawns. Major Walton Clopton Wingfield wanted to distinguish his new game from the old tennis, which came from the French word tenez, meaning hold! So he lighted on the name sphairistike, which is ancient Greek for ball-skill.

Sphairistike became wildly popular, but there was one hitch: nobody knew how the hell to pronounce it. Did it rhyme with pike? Or with piquet? In fact, it rhymed with sticky; but nobody knew that. So rather than make fools of themselves by getting it wrong, people just decided to call it lawn tennis and to hell with Major Walton Clopton Wingfield and his Greek.

Wingfield did keep the scoring system of the old tennis, though, and it’s there that we may find the true nature of love. You may have heard that love in tennis is a corruption of the French l’oeuf, meaning egg, because an egg looks a bit like a zero. This is a myth.[28] Love is nothing because those who do something for the love of it do it for nothing. For example, people either marry for money or connections, or for love. Love therefore became a synonym for nothing, because if you do something purely for love, you get nothing. By 1742 this notion of love being zero had been taken across to games and sports. In fact, the first known reference is to the score in whist.

Love in tennis is therefore the exact opposite of prostitution. It’s the celebration of the amateur. Amare is the Latin for love, from which we get amiable, amorous and paramour. And if you were doing something for your paramour, you wouldn’t charge for it, would you? As late as 1863, a man could still write that he was ‘not an amateur of melons’, which simply meant that he didn’t like them.

The distinction between amateur and professional is merely a distinction between those who love what they do, and those who do it because they are paid. Unfortunately this means that all lovers are rather amateurish. They can’t help it, it’s built into the etymology.

Love is much better than money. You should be afraid of money – that’s what money means.