Monthly Archives: December 2009

When I moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, from Philadelphia four years ago, there was a lot of culture shock. One small piece of that was the game of cornhole. I’d only ever heard that word used in a vulgar context. (More on that usage in a moment.) I had no idea there was a popular game with the same name. It’s a bean-bag toss, played with two inclined boards that each have a hole cut in it, and it’s really popular in this part of the country. Every frat house seems to have at least one pair of cornhole boards; there’s a guy who sells custom-painted boards in front of his house along my route into work; and they have a cornhole tournament at every year at the season-opening party at my wife’s theater.

(Of course, I say I’ve never heard of it, being from Philly, and then the picture I find is from tailgating outside an Eagles home game in 2007.)

There’s a lot of conflicting information about the game’s origin, which boils down to no one really knowing. (Some of those ideas are collected here.) As far as I can tell, it’s probably called cornhole because one thing that can be used to fill the bean bags are corn kernels.

As for the origin of cornhole as a vulgarity, I started reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan last month. The first section focuses on corn’s place in our food chain, and while talking about corn’s history in colonial America, he wrote this:

The shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term “corn hole.”)

Ouch. That makes the stuff they have in the stalls at work seem like Quilted Charmin Ultra Puffy Cloud.

UPDATE: I was just reminded that an extension of cornhole as a verb means “to have anal sex.” The reminder wished to remain anonymous, but thanks.

Boy, where did the last week go? I’d like to file a missing time report, please.

Anyway, I am reading The Keep, a horror novel by F. Paul Wilson. I’ve just gotten to a part where one of the characters has entered the keep, which is occupied by a supernatural horror, through a secret entrance at its base:

Magda stood in the stygian gloom, shaking and indecisive.

Stygian sounded deliciously sinister, and its definitions bear that out. From the OED:

• 1a. Pertaining to the river Styx, or, in wider sense, to the infernal regions of classical mythology.
• 1b. Of an oath: Supremely binding, inviolable like the oath by the Styx, which the gods themselves feared to break.
• 2. Infernal, hellish.
• 3. Black as the river Styx; dark or gloomy as the region of the Styx.

Infernal. Another great word.

The Styx is prominent in Greek mythology. Again, from the OED: “A river of the lower world or Hades, over which the shades of the departed were ferried by Charon, and by which the gods swore their most solemn oaths.”

The word Styx is Latin, from the Greek Stux, according to the American Heritage Dictionary. The Online Etymology Dictionary adds that it is related to the Greek stygos, meaning hatred, and stygnos, meaning gloomy