Despite its marvelously odd sound, there was no word more familiar to me as an infant than "umpire." "Umpire!!" Say it, savor it, roll it about in your mouth. It's a downright peculiar word. Am I exaggerating when I say that "umpire" came into my ken right along with the initial acquisition of language? And that it was accompanied by such other linguistic weirdnesses as "inning,""fungo," "shortstop," "blooper," "rosin bag," "balk" (pronounced "bawk,"),"dugout," "fan","knuckleball," "southpaw," "mitt," "bullpen," and "slump" (among many others). Common baseballese words, all of them -- but "umpire" is the strangest of them all, so foreign-sounding that some of the lesser lights in the PS 217 schoolyard pronounced it "empire." The abbreviation "ump" ("Kill the Ump") sounds less like a word than a stifled snort or eructation.
The word came to us by a devious roundabout route. The "p" and "r" in umpire descend from the Latin "par" (equal). Old French had nonper which came into Middle English as noumpere. "A noumpere" became "an umpire"; it lost its "n" by the same process of rebracketing or resegmentation by which "a nadder" became "an adder" and "a napron" became "an apron" (and "an ewt" became "a newt"). "Noumpere" was not a sporting term; it signified a neutral arbiter of a dispute.
So Don Adriano de Armado in Love's Labor's Lost, a man of "fire-new words," is an "umpire" of mutinies, where mutinies simply means disputes. And Juliet says that "twixt my extremes and me this bloody knife/ Shall play the umpire" -- a phrase which Samuel Johnson glossed as "this knife shall decide the struggle between me and my distresses."
Umpire did not acquire a sporting turn until 1861, just in time for the arrival of the national pastime.
Most American sports feature a judge or a referee rather than an umpire, though American football, which is highly policed, offers a referee, a head linesman, a line judge, a back judge, a side judge and a field judge, in addition to an umpire, who does not call balls and strikes, but instead counts the number of players on each side, checks their uniforms, and watches out for an offensive lineman who might illegally wander downfield. Because umpires are positioned behind the defensive line they are subject to inadvertent concussions and dislocations -- still another justification for my personal boycott of football.
In 1950, Beans Reardon and Jocko Conlan and Al Barlick were names as familiar as Hodges and Campanella. Nowadays I could not name a single major league umpire.
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