Can this be true? A friend of mine forwarded me an email today with this on it. I had never heard of it, Cecil has no article in the SD archives, and I couldn’t find it on the SD messageboards.
I don’t think they used acronyms back then, and this sounds kind of ‘made up’ to me. I’d bet that golf is really an old verb or something like that.
Can anyone provide any insight? Feel free to email me.
Thanks,
Walgreen
No, no. It’s “Gaelic, Overbearing Lord’s Fun”.
d&r
A quick look at http://www.webster.com reveals the etymology is 15th Century Scotland. I’d look more, but I’ve got to go…
You can safely assume any word coined prior to then 1920s is not an acronym.
I doubt Mary, Queen of Scots would have approved of that formulation of the word…
Any word coined prior to the 1920’s implicitly assumes “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden”. No need to even mention it.
I’d always heard that it was called “golf” because all of the other four-letter words were already taken.
(I have heard the horror stories concerning the treatment of ladies and minorities at some private golf clubs, and have no doubt that they’re true. Let me just point out that on the public courses that I play on, however, the only thing that counts is the color of your money and the pace of your play.)