“Blob” is a delightful word. Literally pregnant with meaning and so
onomatopoetic—a blubbery gob, an obese blip, a bloated plop. 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.
