Additionally, there is an entire cockney rhyming slang phenomenon. If your ball finds Barney Rubble you’re in trouble; should you hit a Condoleezza Rice into the Fisherman’s Daughter you have sliced into water. The name every British golfer dreads hearing is the one belonging to an obscure filmmaker from the 1940s: J. Arthur Rank.

Instead of gauging the break and distance of a 30-footer, Brits work on “borrow” and “weight.” A putt that’s slugged past the hole is referred to as “a bit steamy” while one that comes up short but in the jaws “just needed hitting.” And when you yank a three-footer so badly that the ball never touches the hole, British civility dictates that your opponent say “bad luck.”  Depending on how far past the hole you’ve yanked it, he may also say “that’s okay.” This is not a further expression of solace; he’s just saying it’s a gimme. (In fairness “that’s okay” makes more sense than the American “that’s good.”)

One day on the difficult 17th hole of the Old Course a playing companion sank a lengthy putt for a birdie. The match was over by that time but he was delighted nonetheless. “I needed that one for the eclectic,” he said. Eclectic, I learned, is Britspeak for “ringer” score, the competition held at many U.S. clubs in which players keep track of their best scores of the year on each hole. Last year at the New Club in St. Andrews, the winning eclectic score on the Old Course was 22 under par.

But it’s match play that can be truly linguistically vexing. On the 1st tee one morning, I asked why the group ahead of us was entitled to play from the championship tees while everyone else was restricted to the regular men’s markers.

“Oh, they’re playing a tie,” the starter said. This elicited another hapless “hmm.” I figured he meant they were in a sudden-death playoff. That theory dissolved as hole after hole, the four blokes in front of us continued playing. It turns out, “playing a tie” means simply playing a match. I’m not sure why the Brits call it a tie—it’s akin to an equally wacky expression they use in rugby. When a player crosses the goal line and scores, it’s called a “try.” (I mean, why play a match if it’s only going to be a tie, why score a goal if it’s only
going to be a try?)

But my favorite is “jammy.” We do have the word in the States—sort of—a noun denoting either top or bottom half of a child’s sleeping attire (although I wouldn’t allow you to use it in Scrabble). In the U.K., however, it’s a powerful adjective meaning lucky—annoyingly lucky.

Should you ever be fortunate enough to play the 18th hole of the Old Course as I once did—with a drive that sailed out of bounds only to carom off Rusacks Hotel and back into play, followed by a fat 9-iron into the Valley of Sin and then a 70-foot putt that slam-dunked home for a match-winning birdie over your Scottish opponent—you will not fail to hear the same three glorious words I did: “You jammy bastard!”