An etymology of hurdling
There are very few sports from which the language of the everyday almost always borrows and to which it seldom lends.
Usually the vocabularies of sport and the everyday are cooperative. Baseball, for instance, names the plate towards which all offensive action is oriented “home”. And I don’t think I need to mention even one of the thousands of metaphors we’ve re-borrowed from baseball and other sports back into our descriptions of everyday lived existence.
Hurdling is different. The origin of the word “hurdle” may be traced back to the rectangular wicker frameworks which continue to be used for temporary fences and were formerly used to carry the condemned to execution. The first hurdlers, then, merely dragged a bunch of heavy baskets onto a track and raced through—and over—them.
This is no borrowing of signifier to label a new signified. In baseball, runs aren’t scored by players being literally safe at home (although the meaning of “home” is subject to debate). The sport of hurdling instead provides a new meaning for an old, wicker object. The Rortian ironist in me wonders what the sport would be called today if those first hurdlers had instead been in possession of a bunch of permanent fences.
And because the everyday meaning of the word “hurdle” springs straight into English from the sport itself, would we be without yet another word to describe a “problem” or “obstacle”? Don’t we need all of those synonyms we can get?
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