Ma Makes Sports History Fun

Today's subject: Badminton.

Now be honest....how many times have you looked at a purple coneflower and thought...
...whoa! I have a hankerin' to hit a cork with 20 goose feathers stuck all 'round it back and forth across a wussy net.

But it wasn't always that simple.

Right off the "bad" I'll bet you've noticed something that I discovered only today...we've been pronouncing it all wrong!

Just try googling "badmitton" and you will soon be corrected as Ma was. It's bad-min-ton.

Certainly that "n" makes it harder to pronounce. But who could expect any less from the Brits who gave us this game? After all, they have those quaintly named towns like "Puddleby-on-the-Marsh" and "Swampgas-in-Your-Eye."

It was in fact the Duke of Beaufort who entered this game of the well-to-do into the world of sports by instigating its play at his home in Gloucestershire. The year was 1873 and in a amazing stroke of unbelievable coincidence, the Duke's abode was called "Badminton House."

Impressed? Don't be, for delving into the game's history does not stop there.

We must skim across the Asian continent to India, where British soldiers were stationed in the 18th century for that humanitarian endeavor known by it's code name, "Operation Talking Cool and Looking Pithy." A popular native game called "Poona" was adapted by Britain's soldiers and brought back to their non-malarial homeland. There is also a city and region in India that goes by the name of Poona where this forerunner to badminton was said to have been played.

And so do we stop at India? We do not !

Wending our way back to Greece, nearly 2000 years ago we can discover a game with the name, "Battledore and Shuttlecock." Played sans net, it required two people to simply hit the shuttlecock (looked like an echinacea flower, remember...) back and forth between them with the object to see how many hits could be accomplished before it fell to the ground.

Sounds mind-numbing...

But that's not all, oh no!

If we dig a little deeper and look at "echinacea's" etymology, we find something rather intriguing. "Echinacea" comes from the Greek word "echino" which means prickly or hedgehog.

From there it is only a simple leap of logic to ascertain...are you with me, here?...yes, the game in it's most original form involved batting real hedgehogs back and forth!

All the more incredible when one realizes that there were a limited number of insurance companies willing to cover multiple facial punctures.

Fortunately, this proclivity to whapping large spiny rodents about did not last past the end of the 2nd century A.D. Smaller and less lethal shuttlecocks were developed from experimentation with corks and goose feathers, leaving Cicero & Sons Mutual of Omaha breathing a HUGE sigh of relief.

The hedgehogs were more than a little pleased.

That brings us full circle to Ol' Duke Beaufort and his "Badminton House." Some time after the game was introduced at his estate, the original term "battledore" morphed into "badminton." Linguistic experts are not entirely agreed on just how this came about, but the general consensus is that it involved groups of young nobs standing in their white knickerbockers, sipping pre-game martinis and inquiring of each other, "What ho?"

And there you have it...the definitive history of badminton, à la Ma.
 

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