Omar in Wilmington, North Carolina, says that when he was growing up in Pakistan, he and fellow cricket players referred to their team captain as the skipper. The term skipper, or skip, originated in seafaring terminology and now applies to the leader of various types of teams, such as curling or cycling, and sometimes baseball. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Skipper for Team Captain”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, how’s it going?
Hi, it’s going well. Who are you and where are you calling from?
So this is Omar, and I’m calling from Wilmington, North Carolina.
From Wilmington there on the coast, huh?
Yeah.
Okay, well, great. What can we talk with you about?
Sure. So a little backstory. I was born and raised in Pakistan, and I grew up playing a very popular sport over there called cricket.
Sure.
And oftentimes I would hear the TV commentators talk about the cricket team captain as a skipper. And I was curious if the term skipper is used for captains of other sports or if it’s even used outside the context of sports.
Yeah, so skipper for the team captain in cricket, right?
Yes.
Yeah, it’s incredibly common. You’ll find it in curling sometimes, bowling or bowls, sometimes even in cycling. It comes from, of course, naval usage or seafaring usage. And even in more informal context, just some skipper, anybody in charge of a bus sometimes or any kind of public transit is some just jokingly or in a friendly way sometimes called the skipper or even abbreviated to skip.
Did you ever call your team captain just skip?
Not really, but generally I would hear them, the commentators talk about, oh, the skipper is out on the field or the coin toss.
Yeah.
And generally it was the Australian cricket team, and they would be referring to their captain as the skipper.
Okay. Yeah, so it comes directly from the skipper of a ship, and the word skipper itself comes from the word ship, and it basically means the person who conducts a ship, the person who makes the ship go where the ship needs to go. It’s kind of a borrowed usage, the person in charge of conducting this whole enterprise and making it go and do what it needs to do.
So, yeah, sometimes even in American baseball, the manager of a team is called the skipper or the skip.
Okay, that makes sense, yeah.
Yeah, so it’s not just cricket.
So you’re saying in Pakistan, it’s less likely to call the captain of the team the skipper, more likely in Australian cricket?
Yeah, the few times that I do recall it, I would hear the commentators talk about the captains out on the field. And generally it was the Australian commentators or the Australian cricket team referring to their captain as the skipper.
Okay. How’s the Pakistan team doing this year?
Not that great.
I’m sorry to hear that.
All right. Thanks for your call, Omar. We appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right. Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
If you’ve got a question about the language of sports in your country, talk to us 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.
