Question: I recently read in the local paper that a "full slate of candidates answered the bell Tuesday for the first round of what's shaping up as a Republican donnybrook" in a campaign for Congress. I looked up the word "donnybrook" in the little pocket dictionary I keep near at hand when reading the paper, but it wasn't in there. Can you tell me what "donnybrook" means? (Some kind of a fight, I assume.) Also, what is its history?
Answer: "Donnybrook" is defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, as follows: " free-for-all, brawl; a usually public quarrel or dispute." The word, which has been applied to just about every kind of tumultuous struggle from baseball games to political contests, comes from Donnybrook Fair, an annual event formerly held in Donnybrook, Ireland.
Donnybrook, now a part of Dublin, was once a suburb about a mile and a half from the city's center. In 1204 King John granted to the citizens of Dublin a charter to hold at Donnybrook an annual trading fair as a way of raising funds for the building and upkeep of the city's walls. For the next 651 years the fair was held in August on a flat green beside the River Dodder. In addition to horse trading, the fair featured the selling of trinkets and food. Entertainment took the form of dancing to pipes and fiddles and dramatic performances by strolling bands of players.
Donnybrook Fair became legendary for the vast quantities of liquor consumed there. The fair also became locally infamous for the number of hasty marriages performed the week after the fair. But perhaps its best-known claim to fame was the frequent eruption of brawling among the fairgoers. The fighting, which often involved the wielding of shillelaghs (that is, cudgels), was said by witnesses to be all in good fun.
One 19th-century German visitor observed that for all the tumult, the general scene was one of genuine merriment and glee. Eventually, though, Donnybrook Fair's reputation was its undoing. From the 1790s there were campaigns against the drunken brawl that the fair had become, and it finally met its demise in 1855. By that time, however, the name "Donnybrook" had acquired the generic sense that would give it an enduring place in the language.
Question: My co-worker claims that the expression "level playing field" must come from football, but I wonder about that. Can you resolve this by giving us the origin of the saying?
Answer: The field in the expression "level playing field" doesn't appear to be connected with any particular sport. In the literal sense, playing fields are simply open fields upon which games are played, and all such fields, whether used for baseball, soccer, football, lacrosse or any other sport, are of course, ideally, level.
The first known use of the term "playing field" in its literal sense is in a 16th-century British reference to the sports grounds at Eton. It was probably in the 1950s in the U.S. that "playing field" was first used figuratively, as in "the playing fields of international democracy" - apparently without intended reference to any particular sport.
"Level playing field" seems to have originated within the banking industry in the late 1970s as a metaphor for "competitive equality" - again, without any clear reference to a particular sport. (Never mind the fact that a few years ago, the U.S. League of Savings Institutions considered "The Level Playing Field" along with "The Automated Hitting Machine" as possible names for its baseball team.) Interestingly, it took more than a decade before the metaphor was picked up by the world of sports, to be employed in statements like "for the first time our country will be able to play (basketball) on a level field" - a reference to the recent admission of professional athletes to Olympic competitions.