Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

} This past Thursday I went on a field trip with the rest of my
} residential unit at Broome Developmental Center.  We went to
} Cooperstown, NY (located about 60 miles from Binghamton), to the
} National Baseball Hall of Fame!  We saw lots of interesting things
} about baseball and the history of the game.  However, I apparently
} need to learn not to speak so loud when I'm at a museum.
}
} ObAUE: What caught my attention was the fact that on lots of old
} photographs, the name of the sport would be written as two words --
} "base ball".  I think that most if not all of these were from the
} 1800s (MWCD11 dates "baseball" as a term to "ca. 1815").  This
} illustrates the fact that many compound words started out as two
} separate words when they first entered the English language.  Some of
} these have gone through an intermediate stage in which they would be
} written with a hyphen, but I couldn't find the form "base-ball"
} anywhere at the Hall of Fame.

Maybe they censored them.  Have you googled?

My Uncle Fred (born 11/11/11) used to write "to-day" and "to-morrow" with
hyphens, and I have some large spring-clothespin-like paper clips that
have those words on them with hyphens.

If you catch one in the right mood, a board-certified grammarian might
admit that so-called inflected forms were originally separate words (where
in a useless mood or fresh from Linguistics 101 they might say things like
that English only has two [inflected] tenses).

Next step is that one tone of "base" means the game and another means the
thing you step on.

It may not be the loudness that raises eyebrows.  Where a "Hey, look at
this!" might get past them, a loud "Why did you say rare?" might turn
heads.

...
} ObAUE: What caught my attention was the fact that on lots of old
} photographs, the name of the sport would be written as two words --
} "base ball".

ObDrift: Something to try sometime (try it on K; I'll make a point to try
it on my nephew-in-law J):

  <PSOC>
  Ask someone, "How do you pronounce this word: B A, S E, B A, L L?"
  </PSOC>