Shag

Yet another word with multiple, very different meanings (see mole).  To begin with, “shag” is a name for the crested cormorant, Phalacrocorax graculus:

Source: www.sil.si.edu

But it also means rough, matted hair and by extension a kind of rug; a dance popular in the 1930s and 1940s, especially associated with black performers; and a strong kind of English pipe tobacco, in fact the kind preferred by Sherlock Holmes and kept by him in the toe of a Persian slipper upon the mantelpiece of the flat at 221B Baker Street.  As a verb, “shag” is American slang for “copulate with,” a sense illustrated by the OED in a quotation from, of all people, Thomas Jefferson.  In our third President’s defense, should he be thought to need a defense, he employed the word in a quotation from someone being sued for slander.  All these different meanings of “shag” could be expected to create occasional confusion, perhaps comic confusion.  The great pioneer of American linguistic studies, H. L. Mencken, wrote in The American Language (Supplement I, 1936) of an American who might be “brought up with a start” by reading a line from a tobacco ad in the English newspaper News of the World:  “Want a good shag?” 

Here is still another meaning of the word, for which a little scene-setting seems appropriate.  It’s a warm summer afternoon, about an hour before game time.  The stands are slowly filling.  The players are stretching along the sidelines or running wind sprints.  A coach stands in the on-deck circle and with a fungo bat starts hitting balls to the outfielders—flies that they’re supposed to chase and catch; to shag.

Has any American pastime contributed more to the national vocabulary than baseball?  In addition to all the terms for its rules and procedures, the game has generated a whole lexicon of slang.  This kind of thing . . . After flashing some leather in the top half of the frame he came to the plate in the home half after one teammate had stroked a two-bagger and another had gotten a free pass.  He hoped for a hanger so he could go yard and put a crooked number up on the scoreboard, but the sidewinding southpaw pulled the string on one pitch, then threw high heat on another.  Painting the corners, he punched him out, looking, and he had to take the ash back to the pine . . .

Some baseball slang is self-explanatory, like “two-bagger,” some metaphorical but still explicable: the “ash” is the bat, the “pine” is the bench in the dugout.  Other expressions are more mysterious.  Why is it a “fungo” bat?  No one knows where the word comes from, though the OED makes a gallant stab with the Scots word “fung,” meaning “pitch” or “toss.”  “Shag” is even more obscure in origin.  If it seems to me to carry implications of loose graceful movement, lack of tension, ease, that is just my imagination at work, not anything demonstrated in philological history.  Personally, I don’t mind not knowing where “shag” comes from, as long as I can have the word itself and the baseball moment it describes.  The ball is lofted in a lazy parabola to the outfield, where a player lopes not too energetically over to get it, or sometimes misses it, then picks it up and fires it back in and looks up at fans in the bleachers with a wide country-boy smile.