Calling all Baseball Fans/Etymologists: Interesting 1898 memo from NL office...

Cafe Society
1

In an article at Salon, King Kaufmann writes about an interesting piece of Baseball memorabilia up for auction: An 1898 memo from the National Laegue office memo regarding the use of profanity by ballplayers.

The memo is rather shocking for the time; it reviews an incident where a player told a fan “Oh, go fuck yourself”, goes on to list other intolerable language, and leaves every word unexpurgated (i.e. no “son of a b____” or the like).

Unfortunately, the auction house decided to cover up most of the offensive language with another item up for bids (an 1898 ticket) to preserve sensibilities, but there’s enough there to reveal just how vulgar the memo is. So vulgar, in fact, that some think it’s a hoax; the sensibilities of the age would simply not have allowed unexpurgated vulgarity in official documents. One quotee thinks it may have been an “internal hoax”; the letter was from 1898, but meant to circulate only among a few insiders as a joke, not as a release to the entire league).

So, I offer this to Dopers interested in either baseball or the evolution of English vulgarity. What do you think?

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Ha! So Deadwood was right about the level and form of cursing amongst the tough-minded in the 19th century all along! F’ing Awesome!

3

I question whether it dates from the 19th century due to the typeface- it looks too modern. But real or fake, joke or serious, its still pretty funny. One of the blog responses states one of the blocked out parts has one player saying “I’ll make you suck my ass”, and another uses the word gamahuche.

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The full memo can be found here (note to mods, it’s two clicks away unless you have Superman’s microscopic vision.)

5

I think it’s particularly interesting that there bottom of the document states “unmailable.” I’m assuming it’s because you couldn’t send “obscene” material through the mail.

6

Nope. Even if the memo is not a forgery (as suggested by some), you still don’t see “fucking” used as an intensifier. That usage was an anachronism in Tombstone.

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I love the line that talks about language “unfit to print”–you know, the lines printed immediately above.

8

The discussion amongst professional linguists(and other posters) over at the American Dialect Society Listserve seems to indicate that it almost certainly IS from that year. Probably(possibly) not a directive from the League headquarters, but still for real.

If you want to read all of the postings about this on the ADS-L, type “baseball cursing” into the search box in the link I offered.

Of particular weight I would offer the thoughts of Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large for the OED. He wrote the book(literally) on the word “fuck.”

Also read responses from Jon Lighter, whose masterful works Historical Dictionary of American Slang set the standard.

9

But it was certainly possible, if not probable, that “cocksucker[ing]” and “go fuck yourself” was around at the time.