hat-trick

It’s another sporting term this week. A hat-trick is when someone has three successes in a row. It’s most often used in football for when the same player scores three goals in the same game (not necessarily consecutively). We also use it metaphorically when lots of good stuff happens in a row.

So what put the hat into hat-trick? Well, the answer isn’t football, but cricket. ‘Hat-trick’ first appeared in the 19th century when a bowler who took three wickets with three consecutive balls was often rewarded with a hat – or there would be a collection for the bowler to buy a hat. This is believed to date back to 1858, when HH Stephenson, an English cricket player during the game’s roundarm era (I don’t know what this means), took three wickets in three consecutive deliveries (I also don’t know what this means. Various male relatives and ex-boyfriends have tried to explain the rules of cricket to me. None have succeeded). This was for the All-England Eleven against the twenty-two of Hallam at the Hyde Park ground in Sheffield, in 1858. To celebrate this achievement, the spectators held a collection (something which was quite usual at the time when a professional sportsperson did something great), and Stephenson was given a hat bought with the proceeds.

The term ‘hat-trick’ first appeared in print in 1865 in the Chelmsford Chronicle (now the Essex Chronicle) and was eventually adopted by lots of other sports, including football. And the first hat-trick in an international soccer game was by Scottish player John McDougall against England on 2 March 1878 (which is exactly 100 years before I was born). And the fastest World Cup hat-trick, measured by time between goals, belongs to Fabienne Humm of Switzerland, who scored her three goals in the 47th, 49th and 52nd minutes against Ecuador in the 2015 group stage.

Footballers who score hat-tricks don’t get a hat, sadly, but traditionally they’re allowed to keep the match ball as a memento. Oh, and if you score two goals in a match, it’s called a ‘brace’.

nostalgia

I’ve always thought this sounds a bit like a medical condition (oh dear, I’ve got a nasty case of nostalgia) and it turns out, I’m right – although it isn’t anything contagious. As you of course know, nostalgia is a noun (person, place or thing) that describes a sentimental longing or affection for the past.

The word itself hasn’t actually been around for all that long. It was coined by a Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer in the late 17th century (1688, to be specific). He used it to describe a medical condition observed in Swiss mercenaries. These mercenaries were a powerful infantry force made up of professional soldiers who served in foreign armies from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Their proven battlefield capabilities made them sought-after troops-for-hire, especially among the military forces of the kings of France. The Swiss Constitution of 1874 banned the recruitment of Swiss citizens by foreign states, and these days there’s only one Swiss mercenary unit left – the nattily-dressed Swiss Guard at the Vatican.

Despite all this military success, when they were fighting away from home, Swiss mercenaries all got terribly homesick (bless them), pining for their beautiful Swiss landscapes. This was the medical condition that Hofer observed – symptoms were thought to include fainting, high fever and even death. Cases were so serious, and led to so many desertions, illnesses and deaths, that the mercenaries were banned from singing the ‘Kuhreihen’, a melody traditionally played by Swiss alpine herdsman as they drove their cattle to or from pasture, in case it pushed the mercenaries over the figurative edge.

After seeing all this extreme homesickness, Hofer combined two Greek words to describe it: ‘nostos’, meaning ‘homecoming’ (the word ‘nostos’ also refers to a theme used in Ancient Greek literature when an epic hero returns home, usually by sea) and ‘álgos’ meaning ‘pain’.

For many centuries, nostalgia was considered a debilitating and potentially fatal medical condition. But by the 1850s, it began to lose its status as a disease, and this meaning had almost completely vanished by the 1870s (although it was still recognised as such in both the First and Second World Wars, mainly by the American armed forces). Nowadays nostalgia is seen as an emotion rather than a condition – a yearning for the ‘good old days’, even if they actually often weren’t that great.