furlong

A furlong is one of the many, MANY units of distance we use in English that I don’t understand (see also, yard, acre, fathom, nautical mile… I could go on). One thing I do know about furlongs is that they’re mainly used in horse racing. And the internet has just told me that a furlong is equal to 220 yards, which means NOTHING to me, but is apparently an eighth of a mile – about 201 meters – both of which I do, just about, understand.

Thankfully this post is about words, not how bad I am at understanding how far away one thing is from another thing. We can trace ‘furlong’ back to an Old English word, ‘furlang’, which combines two words:

• the noun (person, place or thing) ‘furh’ meaning ‘furrow’, as in a trench made by a plough to put seeds in (and also my brow when thinking about units of distance)

• the adjective (describing word) ‘lang’, which just means ‘long’.

These two words give us a big clue to what the word furlong was originally used for – and it wasn’t always defined as precisely as it is now. It previously referred to the length of a furrow in a cultivated field. This length was equal to the long side of an acre (that’s me lost again), an area originally defined as the distance a yoke of oxen (there are two oxen in a yoke, apparently) could plough in a straight line before needing a sit down and a cup of tea. Which surely changes depending on how beefy (pardon the pun) your oxen are, right? Presumably that’s why this was later standardised as an area measuring 220 yards by 22 yards, and is now defined as any area measuring 4,840 square yards.

Off to the races

So how did furlongs go from furrows to thoroughbreds? Well, that happened during the 16th and 17th centuries, around the time organised horse racing first emerged in England under the reigns (not reins) of King James I and King Charles II. Of course, people have been racing horses as long as they could sit on them, but largely informally in rural settings. The 1500s and 1600s saw the beginning of organised competitions on open tracks (like Newmarket), and racing authorities needed a reliable way to measure the length of courses. Because the furlong was already established for measuring open land and fields, it made sense to adopt it for tracks too.

Other units that refuse to die

The English language is full of archaic units that have survived within specific industries, sports or legal contexts. Here are just a few of those:

• chain (22 yards/66 feet/roughly 20.1 meters): used for measuring cricket pitches (the distance between the two wickets on a cricket pitch is exactly 1 chain) and railways (Network Rail still measures the entire British railway infrastructure in miles and chains)

• rods, perches and poles (5.5 yards/16.5 feet/5.03 meters): three names for the same measurement, which is used for allotments – a standard UK allotment plot is 10 rods/poles/perches, or about 250 square meters, apparently. It has three names because there were three different types of stick previously used to measure land

• cable (100 fathoms/a tenth of a nautical mile/around 185 meters): used by the Royal Navy and British mariners as a short-range distance measure (e.g., ‘there’s a ship passing 3 cables off the starboard bow, Jim’)

• thou (0.001 inches/0.0254 mm): British automotive mechanics, historic engine restorers and manufacturing machinists use thous for spark plug gaps, feeler gauges and metal foil thicknesses.

Parsecs and plot holes

It seems I’m in good company when it comes to not really understanding measures of distance. In Star Wars: A New Hope, Han Solo says that the Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run ‘… in less than twelve parsecs’. But a parsec is a measure of distance, not time (about 19 trillion miles or 3.26 light years).

No one’s quite sure whether this is a mistake by George Lucas or a deliberate choice to show that Solo was just a big old (hot) bullshitter trying to impress local yokels Obi-Wan and Luke in the Mos Eisley Cantina because he needs their credits. There’s also a theory (which started in the Expanded Universe and was officially made canon in the frankly rubbish 2018 movie Solo: A Star Wars Story) that the Kessel Run was normally an 18-parsec route which went around the Maw, a cluster of black holes. Han’s claim to have made it in less than 12 parsecs is actually a boast about both his ship’s speed and his skills and daring as a pilot because he shaved a third of the distance (and precious time) off the normal route by flying dangerously close to the black holes.

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’.

myrmecophilous

If you’re described as ‘myrmecophilous’, then you’re associated with, benefited by or fond of (hopefully not in a weird way) ants. It’s a scientific term that describes the positive relationships ants have with other species like butterflies, crickets, beetles and mites, all of which help them be good at staying alive (that’s the science). For example, butterflies belonging to the family Lycaenidae (which is almost 6,000 species worldwide), are myrmecophiles. In return for protection from predators, some caterpillars have developed dew patches, small button-like spots on their backs, that ooze a thick sugary fluid that the ants go nuts for, while others have a nectar gland that pumps out the same sweet goodness (sounds gross, I know). So the ants get their fix, and the caterpillars get bodyguards (even if they are all hopped up on sugar).

The word myrmecophilous has Greek roots. ‘Myrmec’ means ‘ant’, while the ‘phile’ ending comes from ‘philos’, which means to love. Like extremophile, galanthophile and lots of other nasty words we won’t mention here.

Okay, ant facts.

• There are over 12,000 ant species worldwide.

• The bullet ant is said to have the most painful sting in the world – it feels like being hit by a hammer. Just kidding, it feels like a bullet, obviously.

• A single ant can carry 50 times its own bodyweight. And they even work together to move stuff they can’t manage on their own.

• Ants can be found on every single continent except Antarctica, which is mental considering it’s the only continent that literally starts with ‘ant’.

• The biggest ants’ nest ever found is over 3,700 miles wide. Yep, you did read that right. Called the ‘Argentine Ant Supercolony’ (good name for a band), it goes from northern Italy through the south of France, and out to the western coast of Spain. Many ant experts think it’s actually much much bigger than this and stretches across the globe – that’s because Argentine ants from opposite sides of the world recognise each other (which I think basically means they don’t try to kill each other), leading them to think they all live in one utterly ginormous colony. Here’s hoping they don’t rise up and take over the world… actually maybe that would be better.

• I ate a stir-fry in a restaurant in Cambodia that had ants in it (as an ingredient – it wasn’t a really dirty restaurant) – although I didn’t realise until I was about halfway through. I thought they were saffron or something like that. It was very nice, but once I did realise, I couldn’t finish it.