wales@ucla-cs.UUCP (09/28/84)
Here's a slightly different angle to the Canadian football's "single point" (awarded for an unreturned kick into or through the end zone): I have found several sources which claim that the official name for this particular scoring method is the French word "rouge". Specifically, the 1983 CFL rule book calls it a "Rouge or Single Point", and the 1983 Gage Canadian Dictionary recognizes this definition of the word too. When I asked a Canadian around here (who happened to be a rabid CFL fan) why the CBC and CTV broadcasts of the CFL games (shown on the ESPN cable network) invariably called the play in question a "single" or "single point" -- but never a "rouge" -- he replied that he had never heard of a "rouge" and wondered where in the world I had picked up the term. I wrote CFL headquarters in Toronto asking about the history of the term "rouge" and why it had apparently fallen out of use. Their public rela- tions department apparently couldn't tell the difference between "Why isn't the term 'rouge' used any more?" and "What is a 'rouge'?", though, since all they did in reply was to send me a copy of the 1983 rule book with a reference to the section describing scoring! Can anyone "out there in net-land" explain the origin of "rouge" as a name for the single point -- as well as explain when it dropped out of common usage (if indeed it has)? In case anyone is wondering what in the world an American would be doing with a copy of the Gage Canadian Dictionary, by the way, I picked it up last summer while at the Toronto USENIX Conference. -- Rich Wales UCLA Computer Science Department 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, CA 90024 // (213) 825-5683 ARPA: wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA UUCP: ...!{cepu,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!wales