In yesterday’s post I said that the Oxford University Golf Second Team was called the Divots. Our Cambridge opponents were the Stymies. To be stymied is to be obstructed, frustrated or prevented from achieving an objective. A politician may be stymied by parliamentary opposition, a detective by a lack of evidence, or a businessman by bureaucratic regulations. But the word has a rather more sporting origin, arising from a peculiarity of golf that has long since disappeared from the game.
The word stymie originated in Scotland, probably during the eighteenth century. Its precise etymology remains uncertain, although it may be connected with the Scots word stimie, referring to someone who cannot see clearly. Another suggested connection is with styme, meaning a tiny amount. Neither explanation is universally accepted.
By the early nineteenth century, stymie had acquired a specific meaning in golf. It described a situation in which one player’s ball lay directly between an opponent’s ball and the hole, obstructing the opponent’s intended putt.
Under the original rules of golf, players were generally forbidden from lifting their balls simply because they obstructed an opponent’s putt. Consequently, a golfer confronted with a stymie had to find some ingenious means of negotiating the obstacle.
One possibility was to strike the ball hard enough to jump over the obstruction. Another was to play around it, although this was frequently impossible when the balls lay close to the hole. The situation could be particularly infuriating because an opponent’s badly played shot might accidentally create an almost insurmountable obstacle.
The stymie became a celebrated feature of match play, demanding considerable skill and sometimes producing extraordinary feats of putting. Nevertheless, many golfers considered it an unfair element of the game.
The rules were gradually modified, and in 1952 the stymie was effectively abolished when the Royal and Ancient Golf Club and the United States Golf Association introduced a unified code permitting an obstructing ball to be marked and lifted.
By then, however, the word had escaped the golf course.
During the nineteenth century, stymie began appearing figuratively to describe any situation in which progress was blocked. By the twentieth century, the verb to stymie had become firmly established in everyday English.
Interestingly, the word retains something of its original sporting character. To be stymied is not necessarily to be defeated. Rather, it suggests that an obstacle has unexpectedly appeared between someone and their objective.
Thus, although golfers no longer encounter stymies under the modern rules, the expression survives wherever human ambition meets an inconvenient obstruction.
The golfing stymie is dead, but the English language has ensured its immortality.