In a recent edition of Departures
Magazine (an American Express cardholders
perk) John Kareores came across an article on Donald Steel,
the great British golf architect, written by James Dodson. Excerpts
follow.
I began by asking Steel if the very word "links" isn't the most misused and misunderstood term in golf. He laughed and nodded vigorously.
"I'm afraid so, it seems--and not only on your side of the ocean. In an older generation of Britons, for example, you'll hear all golf courses referred to as 'the links.' I think that harks back to P. G. Wodehouse whose golf stories did so much to popularize the game fifty or sixty years ago. He was always referring to 'the links' and I think over time that simply got absorbed into the general language of the game."
A true linksland, Steel reminded me, is
an ode to geographic simplicity. Golf came from the sea roughly
400 years ago--possibly imported to Scottish shores as the
Roman stick game paganica or the Dutch game kolf--and was
played from its earliest days on windswept land that literally
"linked" the village with the sea. "My definition
of links," said Steel, "is the strip of land which
links the sea with more fertile land, often set amongst dunes.
The best terrain for golf is sand and that kind of land has minimal
agricultural value--which makes such places ideal."
"What," I hear you asking, "does the Oxford English Dictionary have to say about this?" Well, it supports Steel's idea that a link is a strip of land near the shore, where golf is played: "b. pl. (Sc.) Comparatively level or gently undulating sandy ground near the seashore, covered with turf, coarse grass, etc. c. The land on which golf is played, often resembling that described in b." The earliest quote under "link" is dated 931.
But the OED does not support Steel's derivation of the word: "link" is our form of the "O[ld]E[nglish] hlinc, possibly a derivative, with k suffix, of the root hlin- to lean." What undulating ground has to do with a departure from the perpendicular is nowhere explained.
The earliest quote under "golf" is dated 1457. The earliest quote that mentions both golf and links is dated 1538, which means that golf land was called links nearly 400 years before Wodehouse played. Incidentally, the dedicatory quote in The Clicking of Cuthbert does not appear in the OED. The word "golf," says our revered authority, is "Of obscure origin."
--OM