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Trophies
April 15, 2008
Trophies are "signes of victorye" as a Renaissance English writer explained in introducing the word to English in 1555, and there are lot of familiar ones in regular use today from the America's Cup (for open-ocean sailboat racing) to the Heisman Trophy (for intercollegiate football) to the Stanley Cup (for the NHL champion).
Lately we have heard of trophy wives, a beauty much younger than her husband. (Trophy wife seems to have entered English in 1989.) Examples abound, for instance Jeri Thompson, wife of the former senator and presidential candidate, Fred Dalton Thompson; the late Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy centerfold and widow of billionaire J. Howard Marshall. When they were married in 1994, Smith was 25 and Marshall 89. It was, she said, all for love.
Trophy husbands, perhaps because of sexism or media bias, don't attract nearly as much attention as trophy wives. (Dictionaries don't seem to have noticed them yet.) Elizabeth Taylor had one for a while, but tired of him. Demi Moore has one she's keeping.
Women in search of trophy husbands now have a self-help book to guide their hunt. Because we yearn for new words, we've got one to describe them: cougar.
Trophies are found gathering dust in exhibit cases in high-school corridors, celebrating the accomplishments of teams and individuals from times past. Drawing on our shared memories of trophy cases, episode 3 of season 1 of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" reaches its denouement when a former cheerleader, a witch, is entombed forever in the glittering trophy at Sunnydale High School that memorialized her accomplishments as a 16-year-old. We learn that those old trophies are good for something.
We need new words for talking about our victories. Personal Best has been around since 1952—now, since 1971, it's commonly rendered as PB for short. Of course not every competitor wins a trophy. For such unfortunates, there's a wonderful word (apparently coined in 1897): trophyless
Winners of computer games sometimes get You win! in "big, bubbly green letters" (to quote a middle-schooler of my acquaintance). But mostly you just get to a bonus level or an invitation to play more and more quickly. Video gamers get their signs of victory by earning the right to be called hardcore gamers, true gamers, or ubergamers.
Chat-room games give winners bragging rights and trophy words to go with them. W00t! "a cry of triumph" earned Word of the Year Honors from a dictionary publisher in 2007. ROFL "rolling on the floor laughing" migrated from IM ("instant messaging") to a winner's vaunt in the world of gamerz. A new word has lately been borrowed from Russian, bugoga: a "loud laugh" accompanying a victory in the virtual world of games.
Words can thus be trophies, and they don't gather as much dust as the old-fashioned kind.
Richard W. Bailey is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn