Actually, John, it's a term from the game of cricket. You see,
crickets are very annoying creatures. When they get into the house,
they can make a horrendous racket. But they also have the unnerving
quality of falling silent at just the right moment to prevent the
seeker from discovering their hiding places. (You wondered where the
seekers came from in the Harry Potter books? That's right, cricket
hunters, or, as we know them, batsmen, though Ms. Rowling took some
liberties with the concept with that whole broom flying thing.)
In Jolly Olde many years ago, some chaps got together to discuss
their large country manors filled with chirping crickets. Sleep
depravation was becoming a problem. In true English tradition, they
decided the best approach would be a competition. They dressed in
white so as to be more easily visible in the dark, and chose as their
weapon a long flat board with a handle, which they called a bat, so
called because one of their number, before the rules of the game
could be settled upon, thumped a passing bat out of the air with his
stick. (History has taken the identity of this gentleman, but
tradition holds that he was a progenitor of the later, much greater,
Sir Donald Bradman.)
The bat is particularly well suited not only for squashing crickets
on cold English stone floors, but also swatting them out of the air,
as noted by the bat-swatting incident which resulted in the name of
the device. Because of its shape, it's also useful for smashing
crickets that hide behind objects of furniture, which are lumped into
the broad category of stumps for purposes of simplicity and clarity.
So after our chaps got dressed in white and tossed back a few gin-and-
tonics, they set out to smash crickets. One person on the team was
designated as the cricket collector. He carried a basket, called a
wicket, to put the shattered corpses in so as to determine which team
won the competition. But crickets are resilient creatures, and just
because one has been smashed flat by a bat does not necessarily mean
it's dead. So the wickets were lined with an adhesive substance to
keep the crickets from being able to crawl out. Hence the term
"sticky wicket."
At the end of the evening, the wickets were collected and the cricket
corpses counted, and more gin-and-tonics were consumed.
Of course the modern game bears little resemblance to the game of its
origin, but isn't that the way of it all?
I hope all of this clears everything up for you. If you have an
further questions, you might address them to our brethren from the
Commonwealth. This little note pretty well exhausts my knowledge of
cricket.
Helpfully yours,
--Bob Whitmire
www.bwp33.com
On May 1, 2008, at 9:05 AM, jgettis81@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Batsman. Is that some Australian dude that catches bats with his bare
> hands?
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