“Marian Aubrey, are you pretending to be asleep?”
Marian opened one eye warily. She saw that she had not fooled her father. His story to her the night before had made her dream of members of the Ku Klux Klan speaking Latin and lynching numbers from a gallows—even number seven, her favorite. She wanted to avoid having to see such scary things again.
“Papa, I’m too tired for a story tonight.”
“Well, that’s a new one—you’ve never said that before.”
“To tell you the truth, Papa, last night’s story discombobulated my brain and gave me nightmares.”
“I’m sorry about that, Marian, but you need to know these things. OK, I promise you this: tonight’s story will not be nearly as dreadful as last night’s.”
Marian weighed this assurance, looked up at the ceiling, said, ‘mmmm,’ wiggled her lips forward and to the right, and then looked in her father’s eyes. “All right, then, I will listen, but no more politicians and suchlike riffraff.”
Her father gave his knee a resounding slap, to indicate his agreement to this contract.
“Here goes, then: A father once came upon his daughter playing tennis. She was on the court with a male classmate. As her father walked up, he heard her say the word ‘love.’ This made him nervous. He wondered if she was saying, ‘I love you’ or something like that to the boy.”
Marian giggled. “How old was she?”
“Oh, a little older than you, is all. He heard the word again. He walked up, rattled the chain surrounding the court to get his daughter’s attention, and asked her what she had just said. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing? I heard you say something. I heard you say, ‘love.’’
“The girl had to think fast, and all she could think to say was, ‘Oh, yes, I did say love. That’s the word we use for ‘zero’ when playing tennis.’
“‘You say love for zero? That’s singular,’ her father said. ‘Or actually, even less than singular. Why not just say ‘nothing’ or ‘zero’ for no score?’
“‘That takes too long; both of those words have two syllables, and love has only one,’ she explained.
“‘Well, then, why not say ‘zip’ or ‘zilch’ or ‘aught’?’ her father countered.
“‘Because love is the more genteel way to say it,’ the girl said. ‘It’s kind of rude to tell somebody their score is zip or zilch or whatever.’
“‘You could call your own score zip or zilch, though, right?’ the father reasoned. ‘For example, at the start of the game, the server could say, ‘Zip love’ or ‘Love zip.’’
“‘That’d be too confusing. We just keep it ‘love’ for both people or teams.’
“‘Whatever you say, daughter, but calling zero love seems a bit silly and ‘precious’ and maybe even pretentious to me.’
“‘Well, we like it,’ the daughter replied, and turned back to her game.
“‘All right, Bobby, it’s ‘love-love,’ she said to the boy, and winked at him. Her father couldn’t see it, though. That’s why she did it. Bobby didn’t wink back at Billie Jean—Billie Jean was the girl’s name—because her father was looking right at him.
“Billie Jean then served the ball. Her father stayed behind the fence, watching the game and listening to the scoring. He was amazed at the abrupt jumps the score made. The first time one of them missed the ball or hit it out of bounds, the other one then claimed to have suddenly amassed 15 points. This was not the norm—previously, that is. If her father had not been looking, Billie Jean would have said, ‘One to nothing,’ but since he was watching (and, presumably, listening) she had to keep up the pretense, not only of ‘zero’ being called ‘love,’ but also by using replacement values for the other scores, to make using ‘love’ for ‘nothing’ seem more plausible.
“‘What happened to the other fourteen?’ Billie Jeans’s father wanted to know, when the score was said to be 15-Love. ‘You skipped right to fifteen from zero—I mean love.’
“‘The first score is fifteen, papa; in tennis, we don’t use plain old ones and twos and such. We find it adds to the mystique of the game if we give tennis its own scoring system.’
“‘That’s preposterous!’ was Billie Jean’s father’s opinion of that.
“He continued to watch and listen, though. It was astounding to him why they felt the need to devise such a random scoring system when simply using 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 would have served (no pun intended) just as well—better, in fact.
After watching his daughter and Bobby play an entire game, Billie Jean’s father came up with a chart that showed the score both in straightforward language and what he termed ‘racketese.’ It looked like this:
“Now what do you think of that, Marian? Isn’t it silly to call nothing love, then to jump by 15, 15 again, but after that by only 10—after all, why not jump again by 15, if you’ve already started out with that pattern? Is the third score easier to get than the first or second? Why should it be worth only ten when the first two are worth fifteen each? And then they say, ‘Game Point’ for the final score. By that point (no pun intended), the game is over, so why don’t they just say, ‘That’s all she wrote’ or ‘Gotcha!’ or something sensible like that? If the last score is always the same (4, or Game Point) why even mention it or have a word for it?
Marian didn’t respond. Her papa looked at her and saw that she was feigning sleep. Her eyes were shut tightly, she was emitting a manifestly fake snoring sound, and she was causing her lips to flutter as part of this attempted deception. Marian was also trying to suppress a smile, a grin she could not completely conceal because she thought she was successfully hoodwinking her father with her ‘authentic’ emoting.
“OK, then, Marian, let that be a lesson to you: either you can get an interesting but somewhat discombobulating bedtime story, or you can get a boring one. Tomorrow night, you can decide which type you prefer.”
Marian’s papa then kissed her on the forehead, patted her knee, walked to her bedroom door, looked back at her and winked, and said, ‘Goodnight, Marian. Sweet dreams!’
“Goodnight, Papa. And I agree with you: just saying zip, one, two, three, and then ‘thanks for the game’ makes a lot more sense to me, too.”