4 min
The Name of the Game
From ancient board games like Go to modern computer games, the playing of games is an enduring part of human life. Common English expressions like play your cards right, roll the dice or checkmate testify to the way game culture can be woven into the way we think and talk about the world. Sometimes we use game-related idioms without even realizing it. This Word Stories instalment examines a few of these forgotten gaming references.
play fast and loose
When people are accused of playing fast and loose, the implication is that they’re bending the rules or the truth. Most people understandably assume that the word fast here means “quick”, which in combination with the word loose evokes a sense of recklessly low standards. In reality, though, the fast in fast and loose was originally the kind of fast found in the expression holding fast, or the verb to fasten. Fast and loose was a sleight-of-hand game in which people were challenged to make a knotted cord hold still (“fast”) despite a system of trick knots that kept it moving freely (“loose”). Mentions of the game can be traced back as far as the 16th century (G. Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra, 1578), and references to playing fast and loose in the sense of “being deceitful or reckless with regard to the rules” begin to appear around the same time (D. Lindsay, A Dialogue Between Experience and a Courtier, 1555).
William Shakespeare contributed to the popularity and longevity of this figurative usage by referring to fast and loose in a number of his plays, always in connection to the threat of deception (see, for example, Love’s Labour’s Lost, act 3, scene 1, 1598). The reference in his 1623 play King John (act 3, scene 1) to unscrupulous people who “play fast and loose with faith” is a perfect early example of the modern idiom’s wording and connotations. As centuries went by, though, the game was forgotten and the idiomatic use of the phrase playing fast and loose to mean something like “being a bit shady” is now the only usage that survives.
leave someone in the lurch
When people complain about being left in the lurch, they are referring to the feeling of being abandoned in a difficult or awkward situation—often at the last moment. The literal meaning of the idiom is not immediately clear, since the English noun lurch describes a sudden, awkward movement. When it comes to leaving someone in the lurch, though, the lurch involved does not actually come from English. It comes instead from the Old French word lourche, which served as the name of an old game that seems to have worked a lot like backgammon. The name came from the fact that, in French, it would be said that a game player stuck in a hopeless position demeurait lourche (meaning roughly that they were stuck in the wrong spot), and the goal of the game called lourche was to manoeuvre opponents into such a position.
In English, the gaming expression demeurer lourche was picked up as being in the lurch (J. Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, 1598) and the game called lourche was accordingly called lurch (R. Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, 1611). By metaphorical extension, the image of being in the lurch was used to describe “being in a bad position” (T. Lodge, An Alarum Against Usurers, 1594), and to be left in the lurch meant to be abandoned in any such impossible position (T. Nashe, Have with You to Saffron-Walden, 1596). This last variant of the idiom is the only one that survives today. In modern English, to leave a person in the lurch means to wrongly and unexpectedly abandon them in a tough spot of any kind (C. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1839). The idiom can therefore come almost full circle at times: if you fail to help your partner in a team effort at the gaming table, you may well be accused of leaving them in the lurch (B. H. Thorstad, The Gents, 2014).
at sixes and sevens
To be at sixes and sevens is to be disorganized or confused. The original logic of the idiom is not perfectly clear, but it had something to do with gambling. The modern dice game known as craps is derived from a much older and more complicated game galled hazard, in which players bet on the results of rolling dice. It seems that among hazard players, betting on a roll of six or seven was deemed risky. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1375) therefore refers to the action of taking big, bold chances in love as deciding “to set the world on six and seven”. In much the same way that dicey was later coined as a synonym for “risky”, English speakers adopted the phrase setting all on six and seven (The Wakefield Mystery Plays, 1460) as a colourful way to refer to taking a bold risk.
As time went on, the connotations of recklessness or carelessness grew, and setting things at six and seven (G. Joye, An Apologye […], 1535) came to mean something more like “showing a lack of due care”. Before long, to “leave things at six and seven” (J. Calvin, Sermons on Deuteronomy, 1583) meant to leave them in a mess. Thanks to this semantic drift, the idiom slowly took on its modern meaning. By the time Francis Grose included at sixes and sevens as an adjectival phrase in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), it meant “in confusion”, and this is the sense that survives in English today.
play hooky
In idiomatic English, to play hooky means to skip school without permission. Among adults who are finished with school, the idiom is sometimes also used by extension to refer to the act of dodging work or other responsibilities in a similar way. People talk about playing hooky in such contexts because hooky was in fact the name of a game once played by children in North America—apparently including delinquents who were supposed to be in school. In the late 1600s, when New York and New York City were still called New Netherland and New Amsterdam due to the steady influx of Dutch colonists, immigrant children were known for playing a hide-and-seek game called hoeckje (Dutch for “corner”) in “the hooks or corners of the streets” (H. Murphy, Anthology of New Netherland, 1865). As the name of the game and its spelling became anglicized over time, New York writers began to refer to playing hooky or hookey as something that little boys liked to do with their inner-city friends (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1842).
Over time, the name took on connotations of truancy, due to the perception that such boys should probably be studying instead—to the point that references to playing hooky became synonymous in practice with references to “skipping school” (Common School Journal, 1856). J. R. Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1848) therefore categorically defines play hookey, for example, as “to play truant”. Clearly, by this point in the idiom’s evolution, it was possible to talk meaningfully about playing hooky without needing to know anything about the old Dutch game. As the centuries continued to go by, the original meaning of hooky was therefore forgotten, and in modern English the phrase play hooky has become an etymologically opaque verb in its own right.
