Growing up around golf, I came to appreciate its many rules and traditions as well as the precise ways it sets boundaries and defines right and wrong. That not only includes how one plays the game – and how a person does everything from marking a ball on the green to taking relief from ground under repair – but also the words he or she uses when talking about the sport.
As a lifelong golfer as well as a writer and rather ardent grammarian, I have paid close attention to the game’s lexicon and endeavored to use the right words when describing it. That has meant calling the sandy hazards that dot most courses “bunkers,” not “traps,” for example. And recognizing that “hole locations” are what tournament officials create on greens when they set up courses, not “pin placements.”
It is also why I do not use “golf” as a verb. I play golf, but I do not go golfing.
I play golf, but I do not go golfing.
My feelings on this matter are reinforced regularly by good mates who happen to be of the same mind. And that has made me secure in my belief that “golf” is, in fact, a noun – and thus quite uninhibited about correcting those who get it wrong.
Not in a snippy way, mind you. But rather as a way of offering friendly advice.
But my thinking on that subject recently changed after reading a few columns penned by the British golf writer Bernard Darwin, who is to his profession what Tiger Woods has been to the game he covered so brilliantly. That’s because the man who served as the golf correspondent for The Times of London from 1907 to 1953 frequently used “golf” as a verb.
Surprised by that discovery, I reached out to my Global Golf Post colleague, John Hopkins, for counsel and clarity. Hoppy, you see, is not only an ace when it comes to the English language but also one of Darwin’s successors at The Times, having been the paper’s principal golf writer 1993 to 2010.
“I don’t think it is anything more than him employing what was the language of the time,” Hopkins said when I got him on the phone. “Writers used ‘golf’ as a verb quite often back then. So did people throughout the game. Part of what today is Wales Golf, for instance, was for many decades the Welsh Golfing Union.”
“Writers used ‘golf’ as a verb quite often back then. So did people throughout the game.”
John Hopkins
In a subsequent conversation with another Poster, Scott Michaux, I was reminded that one of my favorite places in the world is formally known as the Crail Golfing Society. Located just southeast of St. Andrews, Scotland, and founded in 1786, it touts itself as being the seventh oldest golf club in the world.
Due to those revelations, I have adjusted my thinking. Not in the way I use the word, for “golf” will always be just a noun to me. But if anyone ever asks whether I am going golfing, I will simply nod my head and smile.
Top: Bernard Darwin calling the 1949 Open Championship
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John Steinbreder