Serving Up a Tennis Slogan – Jest for the Pun of It
                                                              Richard Lederer

               

       Once upon a time, the New Hampshire Lawn Tennis Association sponsored a slogan contest. From its beginnings, the organization’s letterhead symbol had been two crossed tennis rackets, and the group's president offered a prize, a can of tennis balls, to the member who could serve up the spinniest slogan to go with the logo.

      Since I have been an incorrigible (and encourageable) punster all my life, the challenge stirred my blood. As I bounced around a few ideas, I realized what a matchless set-up this contest was. With low overhead I could drive home my point for a net gain.

      Immediately I recalled from my childhood the story of the two cats who were watching a tennis match. One turned to the other and said, “You know, my mother's in that racquet.”

      I was having a high-strung gut reaction.

      Then I had a stroke of good luck. I decided to do some research for my slogan by reading the world's greatest writers of tennis books. So I opunned the books of Robert W. Service and Miguel Cervantes, Lord Byron and Richard Lovelace, Honore de Balzac and Joseph Addison, and Ivy Compton Burnet and Kurt Vonnegut. And of course, I read the works of the two greatest authors of all time -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Tennis E. Williams.

      I discovered rich literary gold -- Point Counterpoint (Roger Federer vs. Rafael Nadal), Love Story (Andre Agassi and Stefi Graf), Volley of the Dolls (the women's tennis tour), Winterset (indoor tennis), and King Lear (the biographies of Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe).

      Now I was ready to write my slogans. Linesmen ready? Here they are:

·        Shake hands with our racket.

·        We're dedicated to faultless services in New Hampshire.

·        We deliver a smashing opportunity.

·        Our service will improve your service.

     Apparently the panel of judges reacted like a cross court. They wondered what the deuce I was doing writing these base lines. So as a backhanded compliment, they declared as the winner my fifth slogan, the one that didn't have any pun in it at all: "The sport for a lifetime in the state for a lifetime." And why not? It was the one with the American twist!

 

     The plethora of puns I’ve just served up is made possible by the vast array of terms that describe the game of tennis. Here are some of the more common among those words:

 

Tennis. Descended from the French tenez: “take heed” or “mark.” Frequently used to start a match, the word became the name of the game itself.

 

            Alley. from the French alee, meaning “walkway.”

 

Bye. From the Old English bi, meaning “near to,” denoting a contestant who is left to stand by or near to the competition until the next round.

 

Court. From the Norman French cort, “an enclosed area of yard.” Court tennis, the forerunner of the modern game, was played mainly in courtyards.

 

            Let. From Old English laeten, “to hinder, prevent, obstruct.”

 

Love. The most charming derivation for the use of love to indicate “no points” is that the word derives from the French l’ouef  -- “the egg” -- because a zero resembles an egg, just as the Americanism “goose egg” stands for “zero.” But un oeuf, rather than l'ouef, would be the more likely French form, and, anyway, the French themselves (and most other Europeans) designate “no score” in tennis by saying “zero.” Most tennis historians adhere to a less imaginative but more plausible theory. These more level heads contend that the tennis term is rooted in the Old English expression “neither love nor money,” which is more than a thousand years old. Because love is the antithesis of money, it is nothing.

 

Poach. From Old French pochier, “to pocket,” which came to mean “to encroach or trespass for game; to steal.”

 

Racquet. From the Arabic rahat, “palm of the hand.” The earliest racquets were palm-shaped bats used by the Persians as early as the fourth century.

 

Round Robin. The robin in round robin descends from the French ruban, or “ribbon.” During the 17^th and 18^th centuries in France, it was a brave man indeed who had the courage to address a grievance to the crown. To avoid losing one’s head – literally – some clever complainants devised a rond ruban, a method for taking grievances to superiors with the document signed in circular form by the petitioners so that no one name would head the list.

 

Seed. Despite the fact that this word is often mistakenly spelled cede, what we have here is an agricultural metaphor. In most tournaments the highest ranked players are separated like seeds drawn from a husk and then spread around the field of entrants.

 

Serve. From the Old French servir, “to labor as a servant,” attesting to the relative unimportance of the first shot in a point in the early days of tennis. Clearly this term was coined before the careers of Andy Roddick and Venus Williams.

 

            Set. From the Middle English sette, “a number, collection, or sequence of things.”

 

Volley. From the Middle French volee, “flight,” a derivative of the Latin volare, “to fly.” The application to tennis is first recorded in 1596 for the action of hitting a ball in flight before it has bounced.