March 5, 2001

coach

Do sports coaches and coach seats have anything in common other than their spelling?

Yes, in fact they do-- the town of Kocs (pronounced just like "coach") in Hungary, where a type of very large four-wheeled carriage came into use in the 15th century.

These "kocsi szecker"--'Kocs wagons' that could hold a number of passengers, both inside and out--became popular fairly quickly across Europe. By the 16th century, you weren't a true aristocrat if you didn't have your own coach, and nearly every European language had adopted, and sometimes shortened, the adjective kocsi as a noun.

Coaches were popular because they were the fastest means at the time for a fair number of people to all get where they were going at once. By the 17th century they were being used as stagecoaches--conveyances that made established stops at each stage of a journey--and were used for transporting mail. Hackney coaches further democratized the use of these vehicles; with the advent of motorized vehicles, carrying even larger numbers of people became possible, and the coach's transition from a conveyance of royalty to a form of public transport was complete. In England, single-decker buses that travel between towns are still called coaches.

In the U.S., meanwhile, the word coach began in the 1830s to be used to refer to railroad cars, especially to first-class passenger cars to distinguish them from sleepers. Sometime between about 1910 and 1930, the association with first-class compartments was lost, replaced by the idea of a coach car being any one where a large number of people sit. And of course, if a lot of people sit there, it's not exclusive. By the late 1940s, coach seats on a plane were the cheap seats.

And what does all this have to do with people in jogging outfits with whistles around their necks?

Blame the imaginative Oxford students of early Victorian England. That fastest-to-date of vehicles, the impressive coach, seemed a fitting metaphor for the university tutor who could carry a student along in such a way that he was sure to pass his exams. Both noun and verb soon left the cloistered colleges of Oxford and entered the general informal language, still frequently in quotation marks around 1850, and usually unmarked by the 1870s: "The superb Cuff himself, at whose condescension Dobbin could only blush and wonder, helped him on with his Latin verses; 'coached' him in play-hours..."(Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1847-8).

This reference to "play-hours" doesn't refer to sports, but rather to Cuff using out-of-classroom time to tutor Dobbin. However, by the 1860s, the concept of tutelage was extended to sports, first with boat racing and later with any kind of sport. So there you have it: from a Hungarian people-mover, to a one-man crash course, to Mike Ditka. Evolution, yes--but progress?

Wendalyn