Chess and the English Language

Edward Winter

In the January 1981 BCM (page 4) G.H. Diggle wrote that Staunton would have cut his throat before penning the hideous expression ‘grandmaster norm’. We seek other examples of linguistic barbarisms. One such is the remark about playing in several ‘Swisses’.

(271)

From page 248 of the January 1983 CHESS:

‘England’s players out-Elo’d their opponents.’

W.H. Cozens (Ilminster, England) writes:

‘The verb to sac is with us; the participle sacing still gives one a jolt.’

(415)

J. Speelman and J. Tisdall’s Moscow Marathon (London, 1985), which is about the world championship match before last, was a relatively long time in production, although the English is of such low quality that it seems unlikely that the co-authors were the ones who held things up. The personal pronoun ‘I’ is often used, with no indication as to whether it is J.S. or J.T. who is writing, so they must take equal blame for such horrors as ‘Kasparov ... was playing slower and slower’ (page 20) and ‘Match officials were bemoaning the cost of running the event and these are truly staggering’ (page 164). Due to for owing to, trivial is misused, and participles, past and present, are left to dangle:

‘Caught in a quandary of his own design, his bids for counterplay only hastened his downfall.’ (Page 16)

‘Perhaps being a born sceptic, the position on the board did not look so clear to me.’ (Page 188)

Given that neither J.S. nor J.T. is famed for correct use of language, it is a pity that no-one at Unwin Paperbacks took on the kind of editing described by Clive James on page 33 of Falling Towards England (London, 1985):

‘... sorting out tenses, expunging solecisms and re-allocating misplaced clauses to the stump from which they had been torn loose by the sort of non-writing writer for whom grammar is not even a mystery, merely an irrelevance.’

(1079)

The Crowood Press has produced two titles. Winning Endgames by Tony Kosten (Ramsbury, 1987) is a rather slight work, parts of which are written in ahead-of-the-dictionaries English. Page 17: ‘A lot of chessplayers are under the impression that pawn endings are trivial because of the absence of other pieces.’ Or page 117: ‘White makes a trivial draw.’ Page 56 talks of ‘Black’s hopes of a perpetual’, a neologism which appears three times more on pages 92-93. Page 69 has a sentence that could have been penned by Jon Speelman: ‘Botvinnik was probably the finest protagonist of the white side of the Nimzo-Indian ever.’ The other Crowood Press book, Chess Openings by Mike Basman (Ramsbury, 1987), is more substantial and escapes from the treadmill that usually afflicts such beginners’ works, for Basman is good at giving original touches to routine matters. But at page 163 we all but yelped in pain: ‘The above diagram shows that Black is almost back rank mated ...’

[Regarding ‘a perpetual’, an old sighting of the abbreviated Americanism ‘a perp’ may be noted: ‘Since perpetual check or “a perp”, as it is commonly called, occurs often enough during the course of play, it is definitely a worthwhile subject for study.’ That was written by I.A. Horowitz on page 87 of Chess Review, March 1954. A caption on the same page began ‘A Perp at Need’.]

From John Roycroft (London):

‘I should like to make a point arising out of C.N. 1405. My complaint about ungrammatical English or poor style in new books by young British players is directed more at the publisher than the author: don’t publishers have standards any more? However, I am less strict than you, for I would accept Tony Kosten’s unambiguous phraseologies as quoted if only they had been oral instead of written. But why does the publisher allow young chess writers to get away with careless oral speech when it isn’t oral at all? Is it only we stick-in-the-muds (h’m - not, I think, sticks-in-the-mud) who claim there is any difference?’

In C.N. 1405 we had ‘back rank mated’; we now note on page 220 of the algebraic edition of Keres’ Practical Chess Endings (translated for Batsford by John Littlewood): ‘White is himself zugzwanged after 1 Bd4+ ...’ Next somebody will be zwischenzuged.

In any discussion of linguistic barbarism the name of Jon Speelman rarely remains in the background. Batsford have just issued a reprint of Réti’s Masters of the Chess Board (which, a silly blurb pretends, is ‘the only collection of the best games of all the world’s leading pre-war players from Anderssen to Alekhine’). Speelman provides a Foreword, from which we quote the first paragraph in full:

‘I was very pleased when Batsford asked me to write a new introduction to this book, the more so since, as I freely admit, I have never read it before! Of course, I knew of Masters of the Chess Board as one of the classics. But there are so many chess books and chess tournaments nowadays ... one could, now, justifiably retort not nearly so much chess literature to which genre (if such exists) this most definitely belongs.’

In Réti’s day such gibberish as that last sentence would have been unmercifully expunged by a member of the editorial staff.

Recent issues of the British Chess Federation’s Newsflash have also been a cat’s concert. A sentence from the lead story (‘Short Coasts Home in Iceland’) in the 27 March 1987 issue illustrates how an outright factual inaccuracy can flow from grammatical incapacity:

‘Having won at least once against Kasparov recently (in the London Docklands Speed Chess Challenge), only the Soviet trio of Yusupov, Sokolov, and Karpov can realistically be considered competitors to Nigel in becoming a genuine contender for Kasparov’s title of World Champion.’

Several recent C.N. paragraphs have referred to some unlovely words and turns of phrase of the 1980s. It has been something of a surprise to come across this relatively old one:

‘The simultanee should keep an eye on the rate of progress of the single player ...’

Source: BCM, April 1943, page 74.

From page 66 of Playing to Win by James Plaskett (London, 1988):

‘For the next half-dozen moves a cardinal consideration is the efficacy of possible “sacs-back” on d5.’

(1694)

Citations of chess neologisms are always welcomed, especially if readers can offer first sightings. On page 10 of Modern Art of Attack by Ken Smith and John Hall (Dallas, 1988) we came across a word that was new to us:

‘We witness a case of the player with an uncastleable King being attacked by an opponent whose King had already forfeited its right to castle.’

(1868)

As noted on page 265 of Chess Explorations, the writings of George Koltanowski play havoc with the English language. On page 139 of With the Chess Masters (San Francisco, 1972) he annotated a move as follows:

‘Now White has a strong positional position.’

Our feature article The Australian Nimzowitsch quotes C.J.S. Purdy on page 32 of Chess World, 1 February 1950:

‘Black could have “unbackwarded” his KP with ...P-K4, but then 16 P-B4 would help to open the game for the bishops.’

On page 22 of the 1 January 1950 issue of Chess World there appeared a feature entitled ‘The Zugzwanger Zugzwanged’.

Latest update: 24 December 2010

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