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Editor's note: This article was originally published in LINKS Magazine. Visit the magazine website here.
By George Peper
"Blob" is a delightful word. Literally pregnant with meaning and so onomatopoetic-a blubbery gob, an obese blip, a bloated plop.
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However, it has nothing to do with golf -- or so I thought.
Shortly after settling in St. Andrews I found myself in a Stableford competition. At the 19th hole I asked one of my fellow players how he'd fared.
"Not badly," he said. "Thirty-four points. It was all going beautifully until the 16th, where I'm afraid I had a blob."
"Hmm," was all I could muster. Clearly, he had suffered something embarrassing -- a rules infraction, or perhaps a gastrointestinal event.
Later I overheard another chap lamenting a blob, and a third claimed, almost proudly, that his 30-point effort had included three blobs. I had not heard the word so often since 1958, when Steve McQueen debuted in the campy horror movie of the same name.
The clincher came when my own playing companion, perusing our scorecard, said, "Nice round, George. You might have had a chance for a prize, were it not for that silly blob at the 12th."
At last all was clear. Blob was British for "hole played with consummate ineptitude, ball in pocket, no points scored." In the U.S., we call it an X; here it's a blob.
Over the past four years I've encountered myriad other disconnects in the transatlantic jargon of the fairways. Indeed, while I'm fairly certain that George Bernard Shaw was not a golfer, he surely must have had the game front of mind when he said England and America were two nations separated by a common language.
Take "stonker." Sounds like an awful word-sort of a stinker on steroids. The truth is, it has a couple of off-color meanings-but not on the golf course, where it is traditionally uttered with reverence by one's playing companion after one has struck a particularly majestic tee shot. A synonym for stonker is "beezer," as is the more obscure "Bobby Dazzler," the flummoxing source of which is an Australian sitcom from the 1970s.
I've always been amused by the Brits' loose use of words such as lovely and brilliant. In the U.S. we usually reserve those adjectives for special things and people -- a deep golden sunset is lovely, Einstein was brilliant. In the U.K., when you buy a pack of cigarettes with exact change, the grizzled little git behind the counter at the petrol station will say, "That's lovely." Even more absurdly, on the golf course you are likely to be deemed brilliant for just about any feat or gesture, whether it's holing out a 4-iron from a bunker or offering to share your candy bar.
The Brits have embraced the same naughty personifications for golf shots that we have (e.g. Linda Ronstadt for "blew by you," O.J. Simpson for "got away with murder") but they also have a couple of their own: Less than attractive Olympic track gold-medal winner Sally Gunnell is routinely referenced after any shot that is "ugly but runs a long way," and terrier-like former Chelsea footballer Dennis Wise is invariably invoked when someone faces a "nasty little five-footer."
