Today’s word of the day comes to us from www.dictionary.com, and it is vapid. No, the word vapid is not itself vapid, even though that is what it describes. Well, now know…. According to the website, the word means “lacking or having lost life, sharpness, or flavor; insipid; flat” or “without liveliness or spirit; dull or tedious.” Somewhat surprisingly, the word is pronounced / ˈvæp ɪd /, with what we learned in elementary school to call a short a sound in the first syllable. I say “surprisingly” because we would normally expect the long a sound based upon the spelling.

In English, we have long and short vowel sounds, though linguists would refer to the different ways of pronouncing the sounds as tense and lax. Multisyllabic words in English have stressed and unstressed, or long and short, syllables. There are two ways to indicate a long syllable in English: one is with a long vowel sound, and the other is with a double consonant. For instance, when we turn the word hope into the multisyllabic hoping, we do not need to double the consonants at the end of the syllable because the word has a long vowel sound in the stressed syllable. Hop, however, when it becomes the multisyllabic hopping, requires a doubled consonant because its vowel in the stressed syllable is short.

One possible reason (the most likely, I think) for the unexpected pronunciation is the word’s origin. Vapid enters the language, according to www.etymonline.com, in the “1650s, ‘flat, insipid’ (of drinks), from Latin vapidus ‘flat, insipid,’ literally ‘that has exhaled its vapor,’ related to vappa ‘stale wine,’ and probably to vapor ‘vapor.’ Applied from 1758 to talk and writing deemed dull and lifeless.” But then you might wonder why vapor is pronounced with a long a in the stressed syllable. Perhaps that is because vapor entered the language nearly 300 years before vapid and was thus subject to the sound changes that occurred during the Great Vowel Shift. On the other hand, the always tricky data entered the language just a decade or so before vapid, and it can be pronounced with either the long or the short a; I chalk that up to the phenomenon known as “spelling pronunciation,” whereby people look at the spelling of a word and decide that it really ought to be pronounced in one way rather than another, in the case of data with the long rather than the short a, because of the spelling rule described in the previous paragraph.

According to the website On This Day, today marks the first World Series baseball game, played between the Cincinnati Red Stockings of the American Association and the Chicago White Stockings of the National League in 1882 (https://www.onthisday.com/today/events.php?utm_source=On+This+Day+in+History+by+OnThisDay.com&utm_campaign=a8ff2c1a32-DE+UE&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b15ebf209d-a8ff2c1a32-112888949). It’s an interesting assertion because in one way it is true, but in another way it isn’t.

The National League was formed in 1876, after a 5-year period of the National Association of Base Ball Players. This new league was developing the game even while professional players were playing the game. For instance, in 1884, overhand pitching was made legal—up until then, the pitching was underhand. In 1901, the league began counting foul balls as strikes, which had not been done before. One rule that it kept from the National Association of Base Ball Players was that it barred African-American players.

The American Association was founded in 1882 and lasted until 1891, ten seasons. It was a little different from the National League. For one thing, it allowed Sunday games, which the NL did not allow. It allowed alcoholic beverages to be served at the ball park during games (I grew up with the Philadelphia Phillies being sponsored by Ballantine Beer, so the idea of professional baseball venues not serving beer is really hard to imagine). The American Association also included an African-American player or two during its brief tenure.

In 1892, the champion of the National League, the Chicago White Stockings (lately the Chicago Cubs) lost Game 1 to the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the champion of the American Association, by a score of 4-0. The next day, in Game 2 of the series, the White Stockings came back to beat the Red Stockings 2-0. Then the series ended because the American Association threatened to expel the Red Stockings if they didn’t stop playing. But then just two years later the two leagues agreed to an exhibition at the end of the season that would be, essentially, like the World Series. The official World Series did not begin until 1903, when it was between the National League and the recently formed American League.

Baseball was somewhat different than the game we watch and play today. For instance, in 1884 Charles Radbourn set the all-time record for most wins in a season with 59; today’s starters rarely even start more than 30 games. In 1879, Will White set the record for most complete games in a season at 75; by contrast, in 2019, two pitchers had 3 complete games to tie for the major league lead in the category. On July 4, 1905, at the Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston, Cy Young of the Boston Americans and Rube Waddell of the Philadelphia Athletics pitched complete games against each other in a game won by the A’s 4-2, in 20 innings (https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/short-stops/a-game-for-the-ages). In 1904, after 1-hitting the Americans on May 2, Waddell challenged Young. Three days later, Young pitched a perfect game against Waddell and the Athletics.

I would say that the players of the early days of baseball were probably not as good as the players are today; I doubt even Hall of Famers like Waddell and Cy Young could throw 100 mph as some pitchers today can. Players today are faster, too.

But I would say that the game is a lot more vapid than it was at the turn of the last century. Don’t get me wrong—I love baseball. But I imagine that there were a lot more characters than there are today.The image is of a 1910 baseball card that featured both Rube Waddell and Cy Young (https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1910-e93-standard-caramel-cy-young-19800349).