podictionary - the podcast for word lovers

From June 2006

The podictionary word for today is “mall”:  I’m not a mall person, but of course every now and then I need to go to the mall to buy something.  Would you have suspected that the word we use to describe this collection of stores originates in a word for “hammer?”  The word I’m thinking of is the Latin ancestor of “mallet” and it shows up in other words too.  Something that can be banged into different shapes is “malleable.”

Some theories on why the chain armor that knights used to wear was called mail include the idea that it was hammered together.  In the game of croquet uses a wooden hammer to whack wooden balls through little hoops.  When I was in my twenties we somehow turned this into a drinking game fully equipped with rules that legitimized smacking someone else’s ball into the woods, or on a good day, into the river.  This game, or a game like it has been around for a long time.

The oldest name for it is closh and the name it had prior to being croquet was pall-mall.  You may recognize the name of a landmark of London England in the name of this game which translates simply as ball-mallet.  Of course in order to play croquet you need a stretch of green space and the name of the game of pall-mall is what gave the alley where it was played its name.  The place in London is only one of many where this games space gave its name to a later street called “the mall.”  And of course many of these became shopping streets and in turn, first in America, Australia and New Zealand the name started to be applied to enclosed shopping areas.

The first citation for this was in 1959 in what I’ll assume was a trade magazine, unbelievably titled Chain Store Age.  I was surprised to see in looking this stuff over that the game of closh had for many years been outlawed in England along with such other questionable pursuits as tennis, horseshoes and bowling.  Why would these innocent activities—my own version of croquet aside—be made illegal I wondered.  The explanation I found upon looking into it seems to be based on three things.  Henry VIII was the first to pass legislation against such unlawful gaming.

At the time it was felt that gambling between participants on such games was immoral in that the more talented player was depriving the loser of his hard earned cash through little better than trickery.  The legislation itself compares it to stealing.  A second reason was that anyone who had time to get really good at such games wasn’t out there working and contributing to the national economy.

Finally, in those days national defense was a much more grass roots operation.  Almost everyone in the country—anyone who owned property anyway—was legally required to keep weapons in their house so that in times of war, the king could call on them to fight.  It wasn’t the right to bear arms, it was the obligation.  It was also considered that if someone had hours to wile away, they should be practicing their archery, not whacking at wooden balls with mallets.