Much Ado About Zero, Cipher, Naught

As a Cincinnati Reds fan there has not been much to cheer about this year. But this last week the Reds took their first series in St. Louis from the Cardinals in the last ten visits. Not only that, but they had back-to-back shutouts, which means the Cardinals scored - wait for it - zero, zilch, zip runs! That's the first time they've accomplished that feat since 1937. The "redbirds" scored in only one inning of the 27 they played, the last 24 in a row. That is 26 "goose eggs" in 27 innings for Reds' pitchers.

Which gets me to today's post. Zeroes, or ciphers - particularly if you're British (in which the previous paragraph may be a different kind of cipher: a coded message requiring interpretation/deciphering if you will) - are known in baseball colloquially as "goose eggs" because of the resemblance of zeroes to eggs. According to the book 2107 Curious Word Origins, Sayings, & Expressions, by Charles Earle Funk, its first recorded use was in 1886, by the New York Times, in its report on a baseball game: "The New York players presented the Boston men with nine unpalatable goose eggs in their contest on the Polo Grounds yesterday." Britain has its own version: in 1863 Charles Reade's Hard Cash described a failure to score at cricket achieving a "duck's egg."

The concept of zero is interesting. Etymonline.com has a posting on it here that explains, basically, that the concept didn't exist except in Babylonian, Mayan, and Indian number systems. The word zero came to English in about 1600 from the French word zéro, or directly from the Italian zero. Either would have come from the Medieval Latin word zephirum from the Arabic word sifr, a translation of the Sanskrit word for desert, empty place, or nought: sunya-m.

The word cipher is older. It also ultimately comes from sunya-m, although it's easier to see its etymology from sifr. It arrived in English in the late 1300s. Again according to etymonline.com it "came to Europe with Arabic numerals.Originally in English 'zero,' then 'any numeral' (early 15c.), then (first in French and Italian) [a] 'secret way of writing; coded message' (a sense first attested in English 1520s), because early codes oftn substituted numbers for letters."

In the paragraph before last the word nought is used. I remember it being used most often when there were people alive talking about the first decade of the 20th century, in which a year was often referred to as "nineteen-nought...."  Nought (or naught - both are acceptable) comes from Old English (where it was nowiht) and has meant "zero, cipher" since the early 1400s.

Since we're on the subject, Zero Mostel (1915-1977) was a comedic actor born in Brooklyn as Samuel Joel Mostel. He was nicknamed Zero by the press agent for a club at which he was hired as a comedian who said "here's a guy who started from nothing."

And finally, Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing in the late 1500s. He could have called it Much Ado About Zero or Much Ado About Cipher. But he didn't.