I walked into the club carrying my change of clothes in a Zara paper bag. (Don’t ask.)
It sparked off a barrage of trash talk from my mates, who all toted the usual and ostensibly far more “manly” Boston bags.
It can’t be denied. There is a healthy dose of machismo that goes along with competitive sports. One-upmanship. Locker-room smack talk far too easily over steps the line into chauvinism.
Kind of defeats the purpose I thought. For what is the ultimate purpose of machismo if it is not essentially a peacock puffing up its chest and flexing its display feathers to attract the chicks … the birds … the potential WAGs. An innocent paper bag from Zara, a brand of women’s fashion clothing, really shouldn’t be a catalyst for chauvinist smack talk, but it was.
Being dismissed without scoring even a single run in cricket is called being ‘out for a duck’. Why offend the bird, what has the poor thing done to deserve being associated with a score of zero.
No complaints from golf’s feathered friends the birdie, eagle and albatross though. The connotations are all good and positive.
A “century” quite logically relates to a score of 100 runs in cricket. It is also called a ton. Being a macho “ton up” is an old school motorsport boast that means attaining a speed of 100 mph, back when going a hundred miles an hour was really quite a feat. These days any grandmother with a lead foot can safely achieve that driving just about any brand of shopping cart you care to name. And I mean a pukka ton in mph too. Not to be mistaken for 100kph which works out to 62mph. That’s reasonably quick, but not really something you’d want to write home to the girlfriend about … if you’re really macho and all that.
I wonder if the metric tonne, ie 1,000 kilograms, will ever catch on with the macho fly boys in aviation and take the place of Mach numbers.
Probably not. I can see a scenario where a pilot hoping to impress a bunch of girls boasts, “I did two loops, a barrel roll and topped the tonne in my F35”, then one of the chicks counters with, “So? My lead footed granny picked up some fruit loops, a dozen bread rolls and was also a ton up on her way home from the supermarket in her Axia.”
Humour me a bit and allow for all the above to have happened in Boston, which is about the only way I can think of with my MCO-dulled brain to tie all this back to golf and Boston bags.
You see, macho men and dainty gals, apparently in the late 1890s New York’s trend-setting women carried fashionable little purses and wore fancy shoes, whilst their more practical sisters in Boston carried bags that you could actually store stuff in. Over time any bag of a practical size with short handles became to be known as Boston bags.
And so, right back at you, mates! It appears that my Zara paper bag and your Boston bags share equally feminine beginnings. Or, in the words of any strong, practical and often also beautiful Thai or Vietnamese female caddy, our bags are “same same”.
Drive long and prosper.
