Why is a football called a pigskin? –Ben Schwalb, Laurel, Maryland
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The main drawback of a pig’s bladder was that inflating it by way of the obvious nozzle was too grody for words. Still, it was an improvement over what the English traditionally regard as the original football, namely the noggin of an unsuccessful Danish invader. If you were offended by the aesthetics of this you could always stuff a leather casing with hay or cork shavings or the like, but such balls lacked zip.
The real question here, if you don’t mind my saying so, is how footballs got to be prolate spheroids (“round but pointy,” for you rustics) rather than perfectly spherical. As usual with these pivotal episodes in history, it was an accident. Henry Duffield, who witnessed the second Princeton-Rutgers game in 1869, tells why:
I was surprised to see the question in your column about the exception proving the rule [August 2] because I had always assumed the saying came from the “rule” that “there’s an exception to every rule.” Thus the mere existence of an exception to a rule proves the validity of the rule. No? –V.M., Berkeley, California
I’d love to tell you, honey, but if I did, the next mail would bring a letter asking how the engineer steers the train. Sometimes a man’s just gotta draw the line.
