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The Background for Good Conversation - part 4
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Sports and games are well nigh indispensable as backgrounds for general conversation. From a vocabularly standpoint alone, so many expressions and figurative phrases come from them that anyone totally unacquainted with them is hardly fit, dictionally speaking. Such expressions as handicap, fish for compliments, tackle a subject, foul things up, set one's sights high, hit the bull's eye, right off the bat, checkmate, just a pawn, in the rough, fourflusher, and the pathetic "New Deal" are all derived from games and sports. There are hundreds more like them, and new ones coming up every year, which one might not use at all or use fumblingly if one is totally unacquainted with the sports that spawn them.
Everyone should know as many games as possible and should play at least some. Parents should throw as many sports in their children's way as they can, not that they may shine in them, but that they may get the feel and terminology. Students should try to understand the various sports on the campus. A girl who has doubts about a "forward pass" is much more to be pitied for it than if she confuses an hypotenuse with the mighty-nosed Nile mammal. To pass as a true Englishman, it is more important for an Oxfordian to know cricket than Greek. For an American to be admitted into the social register, some knowledge of the mashies and niblicks of golf, the slices and hooks, is virtually a sine qua non! Sometimes, regrettably, I think one must know poker, too. I have often been inconvenienced socially, and even literarily, for not knowing this pestilent game. One of the first books I ever bought, ordered at fifteen from Montgomery Ward, was Hoyle's Card Games. I remember learning Rummy, "Schafskopf," Sixty-Six, Pinochle, Five Hundred, Skat, and Auction Bridge. Knowing these has been of much conversational help to me. It was a pity that Whist was not among these. This deficiency I feel keenly whenever I read or teach Charles Lamb's "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist." In that essay I cannot fully appreciate his comparing Whist with Quadrille and with Cribbage, which latter Mrs. Battle scorns as an "ungrammatical game," for it employs such "solecisms" as that's a go, and two for his heels! But not having learned poker (owing to a latent fear of gambling) has been an even worse conversational liability. I calculate it has cut my talkability by 5 per cent! Many a time, while poker enthusiasts held forth, I had to endure in silent ignorance such poker commonplaces as a straight flush, three of a kind, baseball, and, may Mrs. Battle support me, spit in the ocean! One need not, and indeed should not, indulge in every sport, but for conversational purposes one ought to know about most of them. Two sports I do not recommend are horse and hound racing. To the latter I contributed only once. It was in Clonmel, Ireland, on a sad seventh of July, 1932. Since then, however, whenever I come upon Shakespeare's "I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips," I get a better meaning and keener thrill from those lines, so that I feel entitled to console myself with the inference that the Old Bard had no doubt been to the tracks, too, but probably with better luck! As for horse racing —it is too painful to relate what I learned from it! I will merely pause to remark that my old Dublin-born English professor used to say that one could not properly appreciate English literature if one hadn't ever "touched" a friend for a loan with which to make a last try for a comeback by putting "a few pounds on the nose." But I prefer to change the subject, not however before declaring that what Dr. Patrick J. Lennox said of steeplechases is certainly true of chess. Who doesn't know about rooks and pawns and checks has an Achilles' heel in his conversational equipage! And if he doesn't know any sports at all, I rise to maintain that he cannot qualify even for a sandlot, conversationally!
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