Who Put the “Love” into Tennis

453 words

🎾  🎾  🎾

The modern sport of tennis—the game played on a court, not on a table—has an idiosyncratic scoring system. A game starts not at zero (0) but at something quaintly called “love” and then proceeds not in multiples of one, five or even ten, but “15”, “30” “40” and if both players are equal on 40, this is not called “40-all” as it would be in other ball games, but it is called “deuce”, from that point the first to win two consecutive points wins the game (but NOT the match)§. No one knows for certain where this scoring format came from but the strongest theory has its origins in medieval France, where participants used a clock face to keep score…so each point scored moved the clock hand forward a quarter of the way round the face, viz. 15, 30, 40 – this is as you’d notice a little out of whack because it should, following the logical mathematical sequence of 15, 30, 45, but for some reason 40 was chosen. When one of the players reaches 40, eg, 40-15, 40-30, etc. , if they win the next point they will take the “game”, however if both players have 40 (deuce), one has to win two more points,  the “advantage” point and the game point. Again, logically, this makes game numerically 60 (one full rotation of the clock-face) however not no one ever says “60” in tennis.

Tennis traces its antecedents to the world of 11th-century French or Italian monasteries with monks playing handball, striking a ball with their hands back and forth within the courtyards. This was Jeu de Paume or the "Game of the Palm”. From a game confined to the clergy it spread to the nobility and royal courts as a popular recreational pastime for the elites. Later, a racquet was introduced to the sport and the game moved indoors, evolving into the game of real tennis, and later still, the sport we know as lawn tennis .

The reasons for using the term love as a substitute for zero or no score is particularly hazy. One erroneous theory argued that love came from the French word l’oeuf, however the flaw in the argument is that l’oeuf DOES NOT mean “zero”, the French term being zéro. A more convincing theory is that it comes from the expression "to play for love", the sense of amateurism in sport. The idea being that the player plays purely for the intrinsic love of the game itself, rather than playing to win (Why ‘Love’ Means “Nothing”, www.merriam-Webster.com)

§ deuce is another term with its origins in French, from the French word deux de jeux, meaning two games (or points in this case)