A brief history of golf’s most basic words: par, birdie, more

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The great irony of golf is that golfers don’t I DO that, they play it. No doubt you’ve been part of a conversation where someone says, “I like to golf” or “I’m playing golf today.” You know one thing right away: that person has missed the point that using the word as a verb is like nails on a blackboard. I mean, does anyone go “tennis”?

It’s not enough to hit, you have to talk, which can be challenging at times for a game that seems to have its own language. Patois includes technical terms such as carry and damping and even “moment of inertia” IT MIA. You need to split for the dogs and hit blast shots to the high greens. On the flip side, you should know your morning ball from your banana ball, and you’ve seen both while playing the best ball – which is not the same as the best golf. You can even dine on slaw and chili and fried eggs once in a while. When it comes to clichés, you’ve played cart golf, military golf, and more than once you’ve met the ubiquitous blind squirrel.

Your mastery of “golf talk” signals your insider status, but don’t get too comfortable. Did you know that bogey used to mean par and par meant you should check with your financial advisor? “Curlew” or “whaup” probably aren’t part of your lexicon, but trust me, you wish you had one. The language of golf is full of color and life, like the game itself, but both evolve. Consider the vernacular modifications of matches, where those who were tied by “all squares” were simply tied, and anyone who did not like the “dorm” found that they could not lose.

These changes to match vocabulary emerged from the 2019 revisions to the Rules of Golf, which have played a role in shaping the discourse around the game since they were first codified by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in 1891.

“The widespread use of a golf language coincided with the rise of the printed word,” says Elizabeth Beeck, curator of exhibits at the USGA Golf Museum in Liberty Corner, N.J. “That’s why so many of the common terms emerged around the 1880s and ’90s, the beginning of the industrial age, when it became easier to communicate on a large scale.”

However, many golf terms stretch back centuries, and contested origins are common. What follows is an attempt to sort out competing etymologies, past reports, and scholarly conjecture to provide a history of some of golf’s most fundamental words. As for curlews and grouse, they are the names of a European seabird that were proposed and put into use as props for hole-in-ones… which turned out to be aces.

Par

Like “plates” and “order of mouth,” par came into the world via a tongue-twisting journalist. In this case, one Alexander Hamilton (AH) Doleman, an amateur golfer and writer from Scotland who competed in the 1870 British Open at Prestwick, asked professional counterparts Davie Straith and James Anderson to predict a winning score. After the chat, the pair said a perfect outing on the 12-hole course would amount to a 49.

Par comes from Latin and means “parity” or “equality”. At the time of the championship, the British used the word to describe the average performance of a stock; it can trade above or below that benchmark. A few days later, when young Tom Morris shot 149 in the three-round event to win his third championship belt, Doleman wrote that he had finished two “over par.” Doleman himself finished 20 strokes back, so his biggest contribution to the game is linguistic.

However, even that success took time. The first standardized Course Rating System did not appear until the 1890s, and the level itself did not gain official recognition until 1911, when the USGA codified a rating standard that called it “perfect play without a stroke and under ordinary weather conditions, always allowing two shots on each putting green.” The R&A followed suit in 1925.

Bogey

Bogey originally meant what par does today in the sense that it represented the intended score for any given hole. This definition appeared in 1890, when the secretary of the Coventry Golf Club in England, Hugh Rotherman, established a scoring standard at his club. He called the total target a “basis point.”

To the Scots, since the 1500s, a “bogey” represented a demon or gremlin, leading to the term “bogey man” and an 1880s folk song called “Hush! Hush! Hush! Here Comes the Bogey Man.” At the time, the term meant an elusive figure that was difficult to capture, something like the modern Bigfoot.

As the concept of ground score spread, golfers replaced that phrase with “bogey score” and adopted the idea that they were chasing or competing against Mr. Bogey. A good player could be called a true “bogey man” and anyone who fell short of the standard “lost to Mr. Bogey.” At the United Services Club, open only to the military, they changed the character to Colonel Bogey, who stood guard for decades.

As equipment and courses improved, good players could easily beat par, and “par” emerged as a target score for professionals and skilled amateurs. It was in the 20th century that American players started using bogey as a term meaning 1 over par, which at the time was just another reason for the game’s founders to dislike Americans.

BIRD

“Bird” was “lit” before becoming a bird, if that makes sense. The standard term for shooting 1 under par on a hole is purely American and derives from the slang term “birdie,” which in the dawn of the 1900s meant anything excellent.

Its specific application to golf, according to legend, traces back to the Atlantic City (NJ) Country Club, where AB Smith, his brother William and George Crump, who designed Pine Valley Golf Club, were playing the second hole. AB hit his second shot close at 4, and when he hit for 3, he called it “a birdie putt.” After that, the trio started calling any such act “bird” and it stuck. The club commemorated the event with a plaque bearing the date 1903.

The Americans weren’t done with the birds. The eagle dropped to 2-under par for one hole soon after the birdie arrived, with AB Smith and friends again claiming credit, although the term wasn’t fully accepted anywhere until the 1930s. The logic was simple enough – if a plain old birdie was good, the USA symbol must be even better.

Smith and his colleagues used the double eagle for 3 subs, but this nomenclature was largely undone by another bird, the albatross, which emerged as the preferred choice in the 1920s. The exact derivation seems to have remained undocumented, although the species provides a logical continuity as it is a majestic and extremely rare bird.

cadi

Here the story of the game goes towards France. There are written references to “golf” in France dating back to the 1400s, and many speculate that caddy comes from the French word “cadet,” meaning “boy.” As the story goes, Mary, Queen of Scots, encountered the word on her travels and brought it back to her homeland, where it referred to anyone who worked as a porter or messenger. Eventually, he made the move to golf.

This sounds neat enough, but there’s a problem. Other historians say that the French did not play golf at the time of Mary’s visit, but another game that used only one club, for which a caddy would not have been necessary. Whatever the truth, Mary spoke French, as did many nobles, and “cadet” made its way to Scotland (as did “dormie” from the French “dormir,” meaning “to sleep”) and became “caddie” by the 1600s. Dictionaries labeled it a golf-centric term by the mid-1800s.

before

It feels like “pre” should just be a shortened version of “foreword”, used as a general warning to those ahead of you. It is not.

A more entertaining option revolves around military history, particularly formations of riflemen lined up in rows, with one group kneeling before a group standing. “Caution foreword” served as a warning to the soldiers in front when the rear row was firing, and, according to the theory, this eventually turned into “para”. It has a special connection with Leith Links in Edinburgh, Scotland, which stood next to a fort, bringing soldiers and golfers into close contact, although the warning there related to a pair of balls surrounding the entrance. Either way, it puts the fear of being dunked by a little white orb into perspective.

A second option involves parades, which were popular in the feather ball era because they were expensive and difficult to make. To keep track of those skin-wrapped shells, paratroopers would stand in the landing zone. Before hitting, golfers would yell “forecaddie” to warn their golfer that the ball was coming. Eventually, they shortened the warning to “money”. This, as has been noted, has a certain logical appeal, since the words “caddie,” “forecaddie,” and “fore” all appeared at the same time.

Golf

They say that success has 1,000 fathers, which may explain golf’s unresolved paternal roots.

Contenders for the title include colf, kolf, chole, kolbe, and kolven, which basically mean “club” and are associated with a type of game that involves hitting a ball with a stick. Some historians trace it to the ancient Greek word kolaphos or the Latin words colapus or colpus, meaning “to strike” or “to bind.” The games also appear to have roots in the Roman game paganica, which featured a ball filled with feathers being struck with a curved stick, and was spread across Europe by the conquering legions.

Other experts propose that the Dutch game of golf – played with bat and ball on canals or frozen fields – migrated across the North Sea to Scotland. Of course, it doesn’t help that once the game arrived, the Scots called it a variety of names, including goff, goif, golf, goiff, gof, glove, gowf, gouff and gowfe. In Gaelic, the word is golf.

The truth is elusive, but all that matters is that at some point the Scots started playing a game directly related to the current version of the sport and agreed to call it “golf.” Back then, they might have even “golfed”, but no one does that anymore. At least not if they really know what they’re talking about.