Rooting for the Home Team

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Terry from Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Hiya, Terry. What’s going on?

Well, a little, I guess, conundrum we had. Solving a statistics problem in our decision sciences class, my professor had asked, we were dealing with a problem on the probability that the Cubs would win the playoffs. And the question came up where the word rooting came from, because apparently in Australia, where he’s from, that means that if you are rooting for a team, that would mean that you are having sex with a member of that team.

So your question then is, what is the deal with these different roots, right?

Right.

What’s the root of root?

Right.

And, you know, it’s funny because I looked on the Internet, and, of course, you can find everything about etymology when you’re looking for the word root, but it’s very difficult to find the etymology on the word root.

You’re exactly right. You’re exactly right.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, the root in terms of rooting for a team somehow is related to the idea of swine rooting for something in the soil. And I’m not really sure of the connection except that it’s a noisy affair and you hear little moans of pleasure when they find the things.

So you’re saying that the kind of rooting that animals do when, say, pigs are looking for acorns or that sort of thing, their nose is to the ground and they’re looking for food.

Yeah, very, very enthusiastically and noisily.

Right. So that’s more or less how we get the rooting for the home team?

That’s my suspicion. But as Terry said, it’s hard to sort out all those roots of root. Do you have a different theory?

Well, so I think there are two roots that we’re talking about here with different roots. So to speak, different word origins, right?

So one of the roots has, the root, say, on a plant, it comes from the Latin radix, R-A-D-I-X, right? But the Australian root, which means to have sex more or less, it’s almost always used by men in reference to having sex with somebody else or wanting to have sex with someone else. And it comes from a much older noun form of root, which means penis. And as you probably know as an adult woman, and we’re not going to giggle about this, but the language is just filled with synonyms for the sexual organs, and that’s just one of many of them.

Well, and it still doesn’t quite say, well, where does that word rooting for the home team, when it’s used as a fan. Most etymologies are kind of mysterious, but as Martha was saying, it probably comes from a fanatic, which is the original form of the word fan, for a team is very aggressive and very crazy and very crazed.

Have you ever seen a pig root for acorns? It’s not a passive affair. It’s almost violent. A pig will knock you down and eat your arm on the way to getting acorns from under the must, the layer of leaves and bracken and whatever else is on the ground.

Grant, that was very beautifully said.

I was going to say, do you have up-close and personal experience with this?

I have very much so. I remember we had a gigantic oak tree in the yard of one of the houses we lived in. We had some pigs in the back, and it was massive. It took two or three of us children to put our arms around it, and the acorns that it dropped were just a little smaller than limes. They were pretty big around. And so our father would have us collect those and take them out back to the hogs and dump them in the trough. And you, I don’t know, you’d have thought you were putting their favorite drug in there. They were crazy for acorns. And they would knock the trough over looking for that one last bit of acorn that might have fallen out.

Oh, my gosh.

Well, that sounds like Cubs fans.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That sounds a lot like Cubs fans.

Well, yeah, think about the crazy guys with the colored hair and the painted chest who are shouting into their horse, right? I mean, that is the kind of enthusiasm that we’re talking about here. So I could see how that might. I mean, this is guesswork still because like most words, we’re not 100% sure that’s what it means. But we can see in our minds how the connection might exist, right?

Right.

Yeah, it works for me. Maybe I’ll get some extra credit for finding out the answer to that one.

I hope so.

Let us know.

Okay.

Take care.

Thank you.

If you’ve got a question about something that’s confusing, if you’d like us to help you separate the different Englishes in your mind, by all means, send us an email to words@waywordradio.org. Give us a call to 1-877-929-9673 or drop a line on the discussion form at waywordradio.org.