club – podictionary 749
Apr 18th, 2008 | 
Of course you know the story about Groucho Marx.
He was accepted as a member of a very exclusive club called the Friar’s Club and then sent them a telegram saying
Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.
The word club began its life in English in 1205 according to the earliest documents that the Oxford English Dictionary could turn up.
It doesn’t seem to appear in Old English but instead in Old Norse. What this tells me is that it was likely a word in use in the northern part of England during the time before the tenth century, when the Danes were in charge up there after their Viking raids.
Few people were writing anything down at that point at that latitude and so the word had to wait until the Grandson of King Alfred the Great more or less unified the country, and then until literacy spread north, before the word club could join the party.
The club Groucho Marks wished to dissociate himself with* isn’t the Old Norse club though.
For centuries before and after that first 1205 citation a club was a club was club was a big honking stick that you could crack over someone else’s head.
That sounds more like a Viking word now doesn’t it.
So how exactly did the word that once meant “a big stick” come to mean “a group of people” that Groucho Marx wouldn’t want to associate with?
The Oxford English Dictionary is the only dictionary that I found that even makes an attempt to answer this. The others just say “from Old Norse.”
The OED tries but it doesn’t feel that it succeeds. Here’s the thinking.
The word club is related way back on the mists of Germanic language history to the word clump. A clump can just be a lump, but it can also have a sense of something “brought together” or “hanging together.” This may have influenced the use of the word club in the 1600s when the word started to mean “to gather things together.”
At one point a knot of hair on the back of your head could be called a club of hair because it was gathered together.
People pooled their resources to pay for an outing and that was called a club. And so more generally a social gathering, or the place it happened, or the organization it happened under, all became known as clubs within a very small number of decades.
So a golf club can thus be the thing you whack the white ball with, or the place you do it.
The problem with this logical progression as the OED points out, is that the transition between club meaning a big stick, and the emergence club meaning a group of people appears to be too short.
There appear to be no written records of social clubs or gathering hair into clubs at all before the 1600s, and then suddenly, within a few decades there are a whole gang of related meanings to club with various subtle shades of meaning too complex to have evolved that fast.
I guess Groucho Marx didn’t understand clubs either. He applied to become a member of a California beach club that he knew wouldn’t accept a Jew—which he was. He claimed that because his wife was a Gentile he hoped they’d let his son go into the ocean at least up to his knees.
*see comments
