Seeding a Competition

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Tom from Poway, New San Diego.

Hi Tom, how you doing?

Hi Tom.

All right.

Well, what’s up?

Yeah, well, I was at a party with one of my friends’ party,

And we were going to have this bogle tournament.

And so the question arose, how are we going to set up this bogle tournament

So that the best people would have a shot of facing each other in the final?

And so, of course, we decided to seed it, and we had this original round where everyone would compete to see who was good, and then we’d create the pool of seeds from there.

And so the question arose, where does this term seed come from?

Well, yes, you’re right.

The word is seed, like the seed that you plant in the ground.

And as far as we know, it comes from the world of tennis, and not just because tennis started out as lawn tennis.

It has nothing to do with bonds and seeds.

But, yeah, it’s a method of sort of metaphorically planting the top players strategically.

You know, when you see those brackets of tennis players or the basketball teams in the NCAA tournament,

You have those brackets and all that, and you don’t want to have your top players playing against each other.

You know, in women’s tennis right now, you wouldn’t want to have Hennin playing Ivanovic,

Or in men’s tennis, you wouldn’t want to match up Nadal versus Federer in the first round,

Because how boring would that be?

Somebody would, you know, have to be out, and then you’ve lost one of your best players.

So it’s really just a way of doing what you described,

Seeding them in different places so that by their ranking.

So it’s not S-E-A-T.

No, although in Bogle, that might be the case.

No, no, it’s S-E-A-T.

Does that work for you? Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

All right.

Super. All right. Well, best of luck to you, Tom. Thanks for giving us a call.

Thank you.

All right. Bye-bye.

All right. Bye.

Are you a boggle player, Grant?

I played last with my mother-in-law, who beat the pants off of me.

She’s a librarian, and she’s got a few years on me, so it’s tough competition.

You think as a dictionary editor that you might have an advantage. No, sir.

There’s a whole world of people out there that will smoke you.

We’d love to hear your calls and questions about any kind of game that you’ve got going on.

1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-Wayword.