Idle Thoughts on the “Regular” Season

Despite the best efforts of the San Diego Baseball Padres, yesterday marked the end of the 2010 regular season. I’m not sure what that means for you, but, for Carson Cistulli, it presents a bright, shining opportunity to wax intellectual — which, that’s what I plan to do in what follows.

One thing about which I was — and, really, still am — curious is the word regular itself.

The most peculiar use of regular is the way it’s used by the employees and (ahem) regulars of Dunkin Donuts. I don’t know how wide this particular phenomenon reaches, but I can tell you with certainty that, in both Concord, NH and Newton, MA, to order a “regular” coffee at Dunkins is to order a coffee with cream and sugar. (Although, perhaps this makes sense: given the relative lack of racial diversity in both towns, there is, for sure, nothing “regular” about being black in either. One can only assume that the coffee is mimicking the most abundant local demographic.)

Per Etymonline, regular actually originates with the Proto-Indo-European root reg-, meaning “move in a straight line.” In Latin, the verb regere (“to rule, direct”) informs words like rex (“king” or “ruler”), regens (“ruler, governor”), and regula (“rule”). The last usage is the same as that in, for example, The Rule of St. Benedict (or St. Francis, St. Augustine, etc).

That the word regular has religious origins isn’t so surprising, on account of (a) basically every word has some kind of religious origin and also (b) the MLB calendar itself is similarly cyclical.

The Liturgical Year (the Catholic one, anyway) is, broadly speaking, broken into four parts: Advent, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time. You could make any number of distinctions (i.e. separating Advent into Advent and Christmas, combining Lent and Easter), but these are the four periods that span at least one month.

The Baseball Year also — again, speaking broadly — also comes in four parts: Hot Stove, Spring Training, Regular Season, Postseason.

I’m not sure it’s an exact analogue. I mean, Ordinary Time and the Regular Season — they’re very obviously similar. But what’s more like Advent, the Hot Stove League or Spring Training? Hard to say.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following as one of the many definitions of regular:

Chiefly U.S. (colloq.). Of a person: ordinary, normal, unremarkable; (hence, as a general term of mild approbation) unpretentious, unassuming; decent, agreeable, esp. in regular guy.

That, in itself, isn’t particularly interesting or relevant. What is interesting and relevant is that the OED attributes the earliest instance of this usage to former Cub, Cardinal, and (in 1900) Orphan Roger Bresnahan, in an article from the December 21, 1912 edition of the Boston Globe.

I’ve reprinted the article below, in full. The relevant passage comes at the very end, but the whole thing is generally awesome.