THE SPORT OF ROWING As a participle, “sculling” is also straightforward. It means “rowing with two sculls in your hands.” In the noun singular form, a scull is al- ways an oar. Alle sind noch klar. Here’s where it gets complicated. In the noun plural form when modified by an adjective, “sculls” can mean a scull- ing event, an event involving boats pro- pelled by sculling oars, events such as “The Diamond Challenge Sculls” at Henley, or the “single sculls” or “double sculls” or “quadruple sculls” races at any regatta. Historian Bill Miller: “Events were once designated by the oars or sculls, a four- oar race, a double sculls race, an eight-oar race, a pair-oar race, etc. At some point, ‘oar’ was dropped but ‘sculls’ continued, so now we have some inconsistency. We say coxed-fours and single sculls and apply them both to events.”8836 So what kind of boat would you row in a singles sculls race? For two centuries, too many otherwise well-intentioned people have jumped to the logical-sounding (at least in the English language) conclusion that you row a “single scull” in a “single sculls” race. It’s obvious. It makes perfect sense. No! No it doesn’t. In reality and literally, it makes no sense at all. In a single sculls event, you place two sculls into the oarlocks of a sculling boat built for a single sculler and go out and scull in your single sculls race. No old Thames professional waterman would ever have made such a linguistic faux pas. It was only when uninformed “gentle- man” amateurs invaded the world of true professionals that rowing terms began to be misunderstood and misused. And it’s only gone from bad to worse in the two centuries since. In the past there have been attempts to avoid this linguistic abyss. Some have 8836 Miller, personal correspondence, 2011 called a boat made for sculling a “sculler”, as in a single sculler or double sculler, leav- ing context to determine whether it was the boat or person that was being described. That might have worked, but alas the effort was washed away by the “single scull” tsu- nami. Now this is a problem for English- speaking rowers only. For example, in French and Italian, they use the word skiff to describe a boat for an individual sculler. And in German, the term einer (literally one-er) sounds perfectly natural alongside zweier, vierer and achter. To describe a sculling version of these boats, just add the prefix doppel, as in doppel-zweier. Of course, you would never hear doppel-einer because there is no sweep version of a sin- gle, but even if you did, at least it would make linguistic sense. Only in English do some people try to row a single scull in a single sculls race, and this would drive my old friend Stan Pocock to absolute distraction. Crew As a former New England prep school and Ivy League rower, it came as something of a shock to me to discover that some peo- ple, especially in the British Common- wealth, are uncomfortable with the word “crew,” which I have always understood as describing well what I did in my youth. Haig-Thomas & Nicholson articulated the contrarian view in 1958: “The American style is designed for poor watermen rowing in Eights, rather than for good watermen rowing in Fours or Pairs, little of which is done at American Universities. The Ameri- can term for rowing – ‘Crew’ – suggests quite accurately a collective approach to rowing rather than an individual approach as in England, where the oarsman is encour- 2496
