bandy

In 1606, Shakespeare's King Lear snaps at the servant Oswald: Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal? The verb bandy meant to exchange blows, glances, or words in rapid back-and-forth succession, like players in an old ball game batting the object between them. The game in question was a stick-and-ball sport in which a curved club — itself called a bandy — drove a small ball between opposing sides. From the game's action, the verb generalized: anything tossed repeatedly between two parties could be bandied.

The word's origin before 1600 is uncertain, but the most plausible route runs through French bander, meaning to play ball or to join in a team, related to bande, meaning side or group. French tennis vocabulary used bander in the sense of striking the ball with force, and the same root produced the English band in its sense of an allied group. The curve of the bandy stick also contributed a second thread: bandy-legged, meaning bow-legged, is documented from the late 17th century and almost certainly refers to the implement's crook.

Bandy as a winter sport — distinct from hurling, shinty, and field hockey — is documented in English counties in the 17th century, thriving in the frozen marshes of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. Samuel Pepys records watching it on the ice on 1 January 1665. The Russian game of bandy, now played internationally, descends from a variant brought to Russia by British factory workers in the 19th century, and international bandy competition began in Moscow in 1957.

The verb to bandy settled into idiomatic English in the fixed phrase to bandy words, meaning to argue without resolution — two people lobbing remarks back and forth, neither gaining ground. When a name is bandied about, it circulates without commitment, tossed from conversation to conversation and sticking to nothing. The image of the game is still active: endless exchange, no decisive score.