Joe Bennett: Words are living things - they must adapt or die

The phrase 'batsman' is out of date with the rise of women's sport, says Joe Bennett. Photo / Photosport.nz

OPINION:

The moment comes when one fails to adapt, to keep up with the times, to evolve. Mine has come with batter.

Batter has history. Like most English words it was born elsewhere. Philologists can trace it back more than 2000 years to the Latin battuere which became the Old French batre which became the medieval French battre - all of them meaning to beat - which then crossed into English with the Normans after 1066.

But the word is far older than the Latin. Its roots stretch back to one of the earliest languages, the one the scholars call Indo-European, from which most western languages evolved. We have no record of Indo-European because it was never written but scholars can reconstruct it from its remnants scattered through the languages of the world.

All of which is beyond me. But there are two points to be made here. One is that language is imitative of what it describes. To batter is a violent action and the word sounds violent. The b and the t are plosive letters. Compare batter with, say, wash. The sound of wash washes. The sound of batter batters.

The second point is that languages evolve just as species evolve. Neither is ever fixed. Words are living things and must adapt to their environment or die.

The core meaning of batter is to strike repeatedly with the sense of inflicting so many blows that eventually the battered thing will succumb. Boxers are battered until they fall. Hopes too. And the huge engine that is driven time and again against the flank of a castle until finally, the wall crumbles is a battering ram.

This has led to the noun battery. In law, battery is the crime of repeatedly hitting or wounding, rather than doing so with a single blow. Hence assault and battery. Similarly in war, battery is the act of sustained attack on a target. By extension, the word battery then becomes a collective term for all the guns that are used to effect the attack. So a battery officer is one in charge of a lot of artillery.

And it is this sort of battery that explains our use of the word to describe the little cylinders of electricity. They originally consisted of a battery of primitive cells all joined together in a laboratory to create a current.

Batter has also become a noun in its own right, meaning the stuff we dip fish in before frying it. It is known as batter because it consists of a solid and a liquid, typically flour and water, that have to be beaten together.

From the same original root comes the word bat, meaning any sort of club used to beat a ball about, as in baseball, cricket or table tennis. This in turn becomes a verb when it is our turn to bat or we bat ideas around in a meeting. (Though the furry little squeaking bat that tangles famously in women’s hair derives from an entirely different linguistic source.)

All of this brings us, at last, to the use of the word batter as a noun to mean someone who bats. It has a respectable pedigree. All my lifetime it has been used to describe baseballers and softballers. But never cricketers.

There was no reason why it should be so. After all, one who bowls in cricket is a bowler. But usage is usage and I was brought up to describe someone wielding a cricket bat as a batsman. And if that someone was a woman, then I had no word for her. This was obviously discriminatory and I obviously didn’t care.

But now commerce has discovered women’s sports, with the effect that almost overnight the quantity of televisable sports has doubled, and with it the potential advertising market. In consequence, all the crusty old former players who commentate on cricket have been sent to linguistic re-education camp. The word batsman has been consigned to the memory hole. Batters they are now and ever shall be. And quite right too.

But language is habitual. Its evolution can’t be rushed. Nor can it be compelled. However, morally virtuous batter might be I cannot bring myself to say it. And I am not alone. Last month I played a game of old man’s cricket. Few of us could run and none throw. But we still told a good story in the bar and our stories featured batsmen. It is too late for us to adapt. We are dinosaurs braying by a waterhole as the meteor hurtles towards earth.