Barney Ronay often appears the Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. That's because he writes intelligently and allusively about football, and nothing reveals the Eye's roots among public school boys of the 1950s more clearly than that column.
For the Eye, being dismissive of football is still an important social marker - you prefer rugby, of course - and artistic or other esoteric interests are to be teased out of your classmates in case they affect their ability to run the Empire in later life. (As I once blogged, it took the public schools decades to notice the dwindling of the British Empire.)
I'm saying all this because I'm now going to disagree with Ronay, who tweeted today after the prime minister warned us all against "going back to square one":
"Back to square one" is a phrase from early radio football comms when paper with squares on was used to convey where the ball was. It meant passing back to your own defence. In an irony lost on Rishi all successful modern teams go back to square one constantly
As a boy in the 1930s, I regularly listened to such broadcasts while following the movement of the ball on a football-pitch chart in the Radio Times which was divided into eight squares. Captain H B T Wakelam gave the commentary while Charles Lapworth would murmur "Square 3" . . . "Square 5" . . . as the ball moved about the field. Wakelam never mentioned the squares, and Lapworth said nothing else. The phrase "back to square one" was never used.
On the 50th anniversary of broadcast commentaries in 1973, an article in the Radio Times credited the phrase to these commentaries, but one has only to look at the diagram to see that the phrase could have no relevance: "back" to one team would be "forward" to the other; the restart after a goal was never in square one; and a pass-back to goal could also be "back to square two", "square seven" or "square eight".
"For me he's written that too well. If he'd just dashed something off, he'd have beaten the keeper.""He's trying to compete at the top level and he's taken way too long over moving the game on. It's embarrassing."
Later. Thanks for to a reader for sending me the link to an edition of Balderdash and Piffle from 2006 that considers the derivation of 'back to square one'. It examines and rejects the football theory, as well as another about the phrase coming from the game of hopscotch. It finds a 1959 example of the phrase that mentions the game of Snakes and Ladders, but the fact the author has to spell out his meaning suggests the phrase was not much in circulation then.
Besides what interests me now is the reason for the sudden popularity of the phrase from 1970. I shall go back to the British Newspaper Archive for clues.
4 comments:
Have you looked at American patterns of usage?
Good question. You can do separate Ngrams for American English and British English, but both are flat until 1960 and then take off.
Eric Partridge in his delightful Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English gives “Let’s go back to square one” = “let’s start again; let’s go back to where we were; catchphrase since late 1940s. Ex the old BBC football commentaries “.
Thank you for that, Anonymous. As you can see from this post, I'm not at all convinced by that explanation.
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