10 December 2020
Handicap is a word without an obvious origin. It’s used in sports, notably horse racing and golf, and it is used to refer to a person’s physical or mental disability, although the use of the word in this context is no longer considered appropriate. The meaning in these contexts is clear, but why this particular combination of phonemes should come to mean these seemingly disparate things is not clear.
Handicap originally referred to a means of leveling an unequal competition or exchange. The method is, perhaps, best described in this passage from the 1751 Sporting Kalendar, which is also an early extant use of the term in reference to horse racing:
A Handy-Cap Match, is for A. B. and C. to put an equal Sum into a Hat., C. which is the Handy-Capper, makes a Match for A. and B. which when perused by them, they put the Hands into their Pockets and draw them out closed, then they open them together, and if both have Money in their Hands, the Match is confirmed; if neither have money it is no Match: In both Cases the Hand-Capper [sic] draws all the Money out of the Hat; but if one has Money in his Hand, and the other none, then it is no Match; and, he that has the Money in his Hand is intitled to the Deposit in the Hat.
If a Match is made without the Weight being mentioned, each Horse must carry ten Stone.
But the method is considerably older. An early form is described in William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman. From the C-text version of the poem, written c. 1390. This description doesn’t have the hands or the hat, but it does involve choosing an umpire to decide how to equalize an exchange of goods. The method acquired the name new fair, after the London market held on Soper’s Lane (present-day Queen Street, Cheapside) that developed a reputation for being a haunt of thieves and disreputable characters before being shut down in 1297. In Langland’s account, Clement the Cobbler wishes to exchange his cloak for Hicke the Ostler’s hood. The umpire deems the hood worth more, and Clement must buy Hick a cup of beer to make up the difference, and if any complain about the exchange being unfair, they must buy a round of drinks for those present:
Clement the coblere cast of his cloke,
And at the newe fayre nempnede hit to sull.
Hicke the hakenayman hit his hod aftur
And bade Bette the bocher ben on his syde.
There were chapmen ychose this chaffare to preyse,
That ho-so hadde the hood sholde nat haue the cloke
And that the bettere thyng, be arbitreres, bote sholde the worse.
Tho rysen vp in rape and rounned togyderes,
And preisede this penworths apart by hemsulue,
And there were othes an heep, for on sholde haue the worse.
They couthe nat by here consience acorden for treuthe
Til Robyn the ropere aryse they bisouhte
And nempned hym for a noumper, that no debat were.Hicke the hostiler hadde the cloke
In couenaunt that Clement should the coppe fill
And haue Hickes hood the hostiler and holde hym yserued.
And ho-so repentede hym rathest sholde aryse aftur
And grete syre Glotoun with a galoun of ale.(Clement the cobbler cast off his cloak,
And at the new fair offered it for sale.
Hicke the hackneyman offered his hood in exchange,
And asked Bette the butcher to be on his side.
There were merchants chosen to appraise these goods,
So that whoever had the hood should not also have the cloak
But that the better thing, according to the arbiters, that the lesser should be compensated.
Who rose up in haste and whispered together,
And themselves appraised it openly as a pennyworth.
And there were others in the crowd, for one was bound to come off the worse.
They, in truth, could not by their conscience agree
Until Robin the roper arose and they begged,
And named him the umpire, that there would be no dispute.Hicke, the ostler, had the cloak
On the condition that Clement fill the cup
and have Hicke the ostler’s hood and hold himself well served.
And whoever regretted first should rise after
And greet Sir Glutton with a gallon of ale.)
The name handicap is applied to the game by 1653, when it appears in George Daniel’s Idyllia:
Ev'n those who now command, The inexorable Roman, were but what One step had given: Handy-Capps in Fate.
And Samuel Pepys makes mention of a game called handicap in his Diary of 19 September 1660, but it’s not clear if this refers to some version of the exchange game or a card game of that name:
Here we were very merry and had a very good dinner—my wife coming after me hither to us. Among other pleasures, some of us fell to Handycapp, a sport that I never knew before, which was very good. We stayed till it was very late and it rained sadly; but we made shift to get coaches and so home and to bed.
And in his 1666 The English Rogue Described, Richard Head details how the subject of his book uses the exchange game to evade the authorities:
I thought it high time to put my Plot in execution, in order thereunto I demanded what difference he would take between my Hat and his, his Cloak and mine, there being small matter of advantage in the exchange, we agreed to go to handicap. In fine, There was not any thing about us of waring cloaths but we interchanged, scarce had I un-cased my self, and put on my Friends cloaths, but in came one that had dogged me, attended by the Constable, with a Warrant to seize me, who they knew by no other token but my Boarding-Mistresses Sons garments, I had stolen for my escape. They forthwith laid hold on my Companion, (finding them on him) telling him, He should severely suffer for the wrong he did his Mistress, in the abuse of her house. Full of horror and amazement, he beseeched them not to carry him before his Mistress, knowing how much he had offended her, she would have no mercy on him; this confirmed their belief, that they had found out the Offender. The more he intreated, the more deaf and inexorable were they; and whilst they were busied about their mistaken Criminal-Prisoner, I took an occasion to give them the slip, knowing that a little further discourse would rectifie their Error.
And as we’ve seen, the idea of giving the lesser side an advantage was applied to horse racing in the eighteenth century, and the general idea of handicap as some form of hindrance or disadvantage is in place by the latter half of the nineteenth. From the British Medical Journal of 7 September 1872:
Other minor discrepancies need not be specially noticed in this place, but they have the effect of raising the mortality from zymotic disease in a single year from 60 to 77; an excess of 17, which, when dealing with numbers so small, is a serious handicap in the race for priority on the health-lists of England.
And some fifteen years later, handicap is used to refer to person’s physical disability. From the American Annals of the Deaf of October 1888:
For a good half of the time I am forced to other than oral communication from others in order to understand them—either gesture or writing. So that, after all these years, I am still at more or less disadvantage, for the handicap of deafness is a perpetual one.
By this time, handicap was completely divorced from the original idea of competitors signaling acceptance of a wager using hands and a cap. Because the origin is not apparent, some have speculated that the word comes from disabled people begging for money, that is from holding out their cap in their hand, an inventive, but incorrect, stab at the word’s origin.
Sources:
Chamberlain, William Martin. “The Experience of a Lip-Reader.” American Annals of the Deaf, 33.4, October 1888, 273. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Head, Richard. The English Rogue Described (1666). London: Francis Kirkman, 1668, 148–49. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Langland, William. Piers Plowman (C Text, 2008). Derek Pearsall, ed. Liverpool: Liverpool U Press, 2014, 136–37, 6.376–93 (Passus 7 in some editions). San Marino, Huntington Library, MS 143.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2013, s.v. handicap, n., handicap, v.
Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 1 of 11. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970, 248. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Pond, John. The Sporting Kalendar. London: G. Woodfall, 1751, xxi–xxii. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Wilson, Edward T. “Sanitary Statistics of Cheltenham for the Years 1865–71 Inclusive.” British Medical Journal, no. 610, 7 September 1872, 270. JSTOR.