The Language of Horse Racing

Gerald Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135965099
• Print ISBN:
  9781579582760
• Subtopic: World History

In dictionary form but offering much more than dictionary definitions, The Language of Horse Racing presents a guide to the history, development and usage of words and phrases employed on the racecourse, by those who train and look after horses, those who ride them, and those who lose their money betting on them. Here the reader will discover exactly what the distance is, and why it is so called; what the cap was in handicap; what relation the wild goose chase had to the steeple-chase; what is dead about a dead heat; and what the differences are between getting in, getting on, getting out and getting up. The Language of Horse Racing also reveals the language of the racecourse, including the bizarre vocabulary of betting, from the betting boots that early bookies put on, to the faces, heads, sharks and sharps who feed off the buzz and whisper that go round the ring.

Saddle First attested in English in the poem Beowulf (?10th C.) as sadol, the word may be derived from an Indo-Germanic form cognate with the verb sit. When a trainer saddles a horse he runs it in a race, a usage first attested in 1928. Racing saddles are extraordinarily light: 200 grams, or just over 1lb in weight. The lightest, known as a pound dock, weighs 9¼4ozs.

safe To make a horse safe was a euphemism for nobbling it:

‘Making horses safe’, as they now call it, was not common in those days, though in the present fast ones it is – being, I suppose, the march of intellect … I forget the horses’ names, but two, I think, in one stable were backed for large sums. Dawson knew that they were always watered from that public bucket, and Bland persuaded Dawson to poison the water. The consequence was that one horse died and another nearly did. Dawson was arrested and tried; and … sentenced to death.

(Osbaldeston, 119)

The safety involves is the bookmakers’: the horse is safe to lay to any amount. Partridge records safe ’un as slang for ‘a horse that will not run, certainly will not (because not meant to) win’ (1871).

St Leger The final classic of the season, run at Doncaster, over 1m 6f 132yds, for three-year-old colts and fillies. Until 1813 the race distance was two miles. The race was established in 1778 and named after a popular sportsman of the time, Lt.-General St Leger of Park Hill. Of the five classics the St Leger, although the oldest, is the most vulnerable to sniping criticism: its Northern location, distance¹, and proximity to the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, all make it unattractive to owners and trainers of the top three-year-olds.

sand A familiar term for all-weather surfaces, as opposed to turf: ‘Postage Stamp and Longshoreman are old hands at the sand, the pair finishing clear of the field in a Southwell maiden in May’ (Racing Post 20 September 1990).

savage The word goes back, via Old French sauvage, to the Latin silva, ‘wood, forest’, and was originally used in English to describe wild animals: the first attestation, from 1300, is ‘leones sauvage’ (savage lions). Since the thoroughbred is entirely domesticated, describing it as savage implies a regression to a primal state. The OED’s first example for the sense ‘a bad-tempered horse’ is from 1889. Steve Donoghue had this to say about savage horses:

There are incomparably fewer savage horses at the present than there used to be. Bloodstock breeding is studied so much more carefully, the mating of suitable lines of blood so much more scientifically planned, and then training methods are so immensely improved from the old days of chifneys, scourges, chains, etc. – horses are, with few exceptions, handled very differently nowadays, and it is all to the good. (Donoghue, 186)

save To save on a horse is to hedge one’s bets: a backer may bet on one horse in a race and save on the favourite, by putting enough on it so that if it beats the first horse he has backed he will come out quits. Such a bet is a saver. The OED quotes, from 1891, ‘Wells says Perfection will win … but I’ve put a saver on Caloole.’ To save oneself is to hedge in such a fashion: Partridge quotes, from 1869, ‘Men who received the news at least saved themselves upon the outsider.’

school From its original senses of teaching and educating, the verb soon developed a meaning ‘to discipline, bring under control, correct’, as in this line from Macbeth: ‘My dearest Coz, I pray you schoole your selfe.’ By the nineteenth century school had two horse senses: ‘to train or exercise a horse in movements’ and ‘to ride straight across country’. The first of these is an obvious development of the word’s earlier senses, the second more difficult to explain – perhaps it emerged from the idea that the horse (and rider) had to be educated to go straight, over obstacles, rather than taking an easier, less direct route. The modern use of the verb, to train a horse to jump hurdles and fences, has elements of both nineteenth-century senses: the OED quotes, for the second of them, from 1885, ‘we schooled back to the Poorhouse Gorse, and a couple of fences of the order intricate had to be jumped.’ Schooling can also be used to describe the training of Flat horses. It is commonly found in the offence of schooling in public, that is when the stewards judge that a horse has been run in a race solely for the purpose of educating it rather than trying to get it the best place in the race: ‘They found him to be in breach of Jockey Club instruction H2 headed “Schooling in Public” and fined both trainer and jockey £150’ (Racing Post 20 September 1990). As a cure for this common practice, the idea of schooling races is sometimes floated. They would be ‘races’ on which there is no betting, and for which there is no prize money, for the purpose of introducing green horses to the racecourse. Loose schooling is schooling a horse without a rider on his back: ‘Ultra Violet is a real test of skill and needs driving. We have loose-schooled him since his last win’ (Sporting Life 24 May 1990).

scope¹ Scope, and its adjective scopy (or scopey), is one of racing’s favourite words. Its horse sense is defined by the OED as ‘the ability of a horse to extend its stride or jump’, and it cites, in support, a usage like this one from the Times in 1980: ‘The final Liverpool fence of sloping poles at six feet requiring more scope than most of the contenders possessed.’ But in racing scope is generally used in two other distinct, but connected ways. One refers to the size of a horse, in particular the symmetry of its growth in relation to its age – and, in this respect, it is worth considering that the earliest forms of the word shape were scap, schap, scape, and sceap, and racing people often speak of a horse shaping well in a race; i.e. it runs promisingly enough to show that it is developing well. The second sense is that of opportunity for development, potential for growth: a horse with scope is a well-proportioned one which looks as if it should grow and develop into a fine racehorse. In practice, there seems little limitation to the way racing people use the word. I have even heard of a racecourse being described as scopy. ‘“She’s a lovely scopey filly”, he said, “but I don’t want to make any plans until we see how she comes out of this”’ (Racing Post 19 May 1990); ‘At weight-for-age he meets Inneghar on level terms, yet the three-year-old should have more scope’ (Sporting Life 13 September 1990).

scope² A verb formed from a contraction of endoscope. A fibreoptic endoscope is an instrument designed for looking at the internal parts of a body. ‘We take blood tests every week and his test showed he had a low red cell count, so it was suggested that we scoped him. He was found to have a bit of muck down his windpipe’ (Sporting Life 14 September 1990).

score At score, preceded by a verb of action, describes a horse making ‘a sudden dash at full speed’: ‘It’s a beautiful race – run at score the whole way, and only two tailed off within the cords’ (Surtees, 91). Score, meant ‘a line drawn’ (1501), from the sense of the verb, ‘to cut’, the line being scored along the ground. This was used in the specialised sense of the ‘line at which a marksman stands when shooting a target, or on which the competitors stand before beginning a race’. Thus the racing phrase describes a race run at full speed right from the start. ‘Of course I told Walton to get away; and get away he did at score’ (Thormanby, Tales, 78).

scrappy A scrappy mover is a horse which does not stretch out properly: such a horse goes scrappy. Perhaps derived from scrape – i.e. scraping the ground rather than striding over it – but the word in its general use means ‘consisting of scraps; made up of odds and ends; disjointed and unconnected’, and the last of these senses probably explains the word’s racing use, the horse’s action not flowing as a thoroughbred’s should.

scratch¹, scratching-board As in other sports, scratch is used as a verb to denote the withdrawal of a horse from a race: ‘Although the horse was announced a non-runner in the Press and on television the day before, the official scratching was issued a day later’ (Sporting Life 5 October 1990). Such horses are known as scratches. The origin is the phrase scratch out, originally the erasure of writing with a penknife (1711) and then deletion ‘by crossing through with a pen’. In the sense of erasing ‘the name of (a person) from a list’ the word was in commo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Y
• Bibliography