How is sitting at your desk related to any kind of Olympic sport?

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Back a few thousand years ago, before video games and online texting, people had to figure out other ways to entertain themselves. One game that was popular for a long time is something known as quoits.

To show how things have changed I bet most people wouldn’t be absolutely sure what quoits was if they weren’t reminded.

Quoits is a game where a ring made of rope, metal or rubber is thrown in an attempt to get it to land on a peg. Essentially it’s the same as horseshoes except with a ring.

Back in Ancient Greek these round things were called discos.

Latin took this word as discus and now you can hear where some kind of Olympic sport comes into the picture.

In the discus event at the Olympics the thing being thrown is round but not with a hole in the middle and so we can see that things that were called by words that descended from these roots were usually round.

One of those things is a dish.

Another one is usually not round anymore.

If you take a rather large disk and mount it on three or four legs you get a table.

This etymological evolution had already happened in Latin before English got ahold of the table variety of this descendant word, but by the time it did the table was no longer necessarily round and the “i” sound had become an “eh” sound; thus a desk.

Not only had the first English desks lost their round nature, they were understood back in Chaucer’s time to be sloping, the better to face the reader or writer as they worked.