Each week here at the Australian Writers’ Centre, we dissect and discuss, contort and retort, ask and gasp at the English language and all its rules, regulations and ridiculousness. It’s a celebration of language, masquerading as a passive-aggressive whinge about words and weirdness. This week, the big leagues…
Q: Hi AWC, what’s the deal with the Ivy League?
A: The group of eight universities in the USA that are considered elite?
Q: Yeah, that’s the one. Although don’t Americans call universities “college”?
A: Well, informally yes. And many are named in this way – but curiously only ONE of the Ivy League schools is not named a ‘university’.
Q: I suppose it has more gravitas to say ‘university’?
A: That might be it – a desire to link back to universities like Oxford and Cambridge.
Q: You mentioned there were eight. What are they?
A: Thought you’d never ask. In order of oldest to newest, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Columbia University, Brown University, Dartmouth College, and Cornell University.
Q: And they’re all over the country?
A: Pfffft. No way! They’re all within spitting distance of each other.
Q: There’s no need to get vulgar.
A: By the way, according to Dictionary.com, to be “in spitting distance” is an idiom that means to be very close – often used figuratively such as being in spitting distance of winning the trophy. It first appeared in 1895.
Q: Cute.
A: They’re all in the northeastern United States, because that was simply all that the country consisted of when they were established, mostly in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Q: But why the name ‘Ivy League’?
A: It really is as obvious as it sounds – with these old universities being home to old buildings that over time saw ivy growing up the sides of them. Apparently, ‘planting the ivy’ was a tradition in many of these old colleges in the 1800s.
Q: So wait. All you have to do is grow ivy to get into the league?
A: Well, no. But this was the common denominator when the term was first coined in 1935 – by sports writers. Initially it was a term that denoted an actual sporting league between these eight campuses. Over time, it came to mean the locations themselves.
Q: So nothing to do with “IV” – roman numeral for four?
A: There is a theory that has been spread for years about an initial four schools – usually noted as Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia and that it was a play on this number and a sporting league between them. But it doesn’t appear to be the origin, despite American football rules apparently cemented by these four universities in the 1870s.
Q: What is a “league” anyway?
A: It came to English in the 15th century from the French ‘ligue’ – meaning confederacy or alliance. Today, it has a few meanings. Macquarie Dictionary describes one meaning as “a society or association”, such that we see with Ivy League. Although as we saw, that started out as a sporting league – another meaning: “an association of sporting clubs which arranges matches between teams of approximately similar standard.”
Q: Makes sense.
All big multi-team competitions are technically ‘leagues’, e.g. the NBA, with many including the word in their title. These include England’s Premier League, the National Hockey League (NHL), Major League Baseball, or Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL), A-League soccer and Big Bash League (BBL) cricket competitions.
Q: So a league is an official association?
A: It can be, such as the “League of Nations” formed after World War I and considered the precursor to the United Nations.
Q: Wait, wasn’t the League of Nations established to stop future wars?
A: Well, yeah.
Q: They had ONE job…
A: Anyway, a “league” doesn’t have to be formal. It might simply be “a covenant or compact made between persons, parties, states, etc.”
Q: Example?
A: We might be “in league” together over a common cause.
Q: Any other meanings?
A: Yes, relating to category or class. For example, “she’s out of my league” or “they’re not in the same league as the others”.
Q: Wait a minute. What about that Jules Verne classic ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’?
A: Ahhh okay. That’s actually a different noun altogether, an earlier meaning that came from the Latin ‘leuga’ – for a rather vague distance measurement that was typically thought of as “an hour’s hike”.
Q: What if you’re a slow hiker?
A: Exactly! Apparently poets liked using it and didn’t mind its vagueness, but by the 14th century it came to mean around three miles.
Q: But hang on, that would make the ocean 60,000 miles deep in that book?!
A: Yeah, well spotted. But the title wasn’t referring to the depth, rather the distance travelled while under the sea! So they essentially went around the world a few times while underwater.
Q: The original ‘Finding Nemo’!
A: Indeed.
Q: So, to recap, the Ivy League is a group of eight elite northeastern US universities that were named in the 1930s both for the ivy that grew on their buildings but also a sporting league between them.
A: Correct!
Q: I think my father went to Yale.
A: Impressive. What did he study?
Q: Study? No, he just needed a padlock.
A: Ugh. Goodbye.
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