ETYMOLOGY
The term “charley horse” is one of those wonderful terms that has fascinated many, all of whom seem to have come up with a different theory of its origin. The term appeared in a poem entitled “Christmas Wants” (The Congregationalist, Dec. 16, 1875):
“By a three-year-old baby. / A red wheel-barrow. / A tin bath-tub. / A train of tin cars. / A little boat. / A Charlie horse with a hair tail to it.”
Several stories, seemingly contradictory, contributed to give the term the momentum it needed to become popular.
The earliest attempt to explain the term (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 15, 1887) was located by lexicographer Barry Popik:
“The name is said to owe its origin to the fact that a player afflicted with it, when attempting to run, does so much after the fashion of a boy astride of a wooden horse, sometimes called a ‘Charley horse.’”
H.L. Mencken (The American Language, Suppl. II, 1948) cited Bill “Boileryard” Clarke, an original Baltimore Oriole of the 1890s, who argued that the term had come “from the name of Charley Esper, a left-handed pitcher, who walked like a lame horse.” This theory was discredited when it was learned that the term was already in use by the time Esper joined the Orioles in 1894.
Another version involving members of the same Orioles team appeared in Forrest C. Allen’s My Basket-ball Bible (1930) and was repeated in American Notes and Queries (Apr. 1947). One day at a local racetrack, several players put money on a horse called Charley, who, winning throughout the race, pulled up lame in the final stretch. The following day a player pulled a tendon in his leg and was likened by one of the coaches to “our old Charley horse.”
Hy Turkin (The 1955 Baseball Almanac, 1955) related a similar story with the Chicago White Stockings, asserting the term was “coined by either Billy Sunday or Joe Quest in the 1880s after a horse backed by the Chicago players had pulled up lame in the stretch.” A note written by Peter Tamony in the Tamony collection, attributed to “Baseball Slang and Origins” (but not further identified), agreed with Turkin, but tapped Sunday as the one who coined the term. It read:
“When George Gore hit what should have been an inside-the-park homer and strained a thigh muscle rounding second, so that he had to limp into third, Billy cried, ‘Here comes the Charley horse.’”
Lee Allen (The Sporting News, May 2, 1962), on the other hand, insisted that it was Quest who coined the term in 1882. Allen reported:
“Son of a blacksmith from New Castle, Pa., Quest noticed that players hobbling around with a peculiar muscle injury of the legs reminded him of an old white horse, Charlie, employed at his father’s shop.”
Peters Morris found a much earlier and more detailed account of this version in the form of a note in the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Daily Democrat (June 28, 1889):
“Years ago [when] Joe Quest was employed as an apprentice in the machine shop of Quest & Shaw in Newcastle [Pa.], his father, who was one of the proprietors of the firm, had an old white horse by the name of Charley. Doing usage in pulling heavy loads had stiffened the animal’s legs so that he walked as if troubled with strained tendons. Afterwards, when Quest became a member of the Chicago club, he was troubled, with others, with a peculiar stiffness of the legs, which brought to his mind the ailment of the old white horse Charley. Joe said that the ball players troubled with the ailment hobbled exactly as did the old horse, and as no one seemed to know exactly what the trouble was, Quest dubbed it ‘Charley horse.’”
The name has spread out today; it has become part of the language of the national game.
Tim Considine (The Language of Sport, 1982) found an unreferenced explanation:
“Often in the 1800s, old workhorses kept on the grounds of ballparks were called Charley. The movements of the injured, stiff-legged ballplayers were likened to the labored plodding of these old horses, and the injury itself eventually became known as a ‘charley’ or ‘charley horse.’”
Gerald Secor Couzens (A Baseball Album, 1980) traced the term back to the Sioux City (Iowa) team of 1889 and an old white horse named Charley. Couzens attributed this version to a minor-league coach named Walter McCredie. This same story appeared in an unsigned article in San Francisco Chronicle (July 2, 1934), but the old white horse in this version inspired the coinage in 1890, not 1889.
EXTENDED USE
The leap from the slang of ballplayers to standard English is described by Tristram Potter Coffin (The Old Ball Game, 1971) as being so complete “that most people would have trouble describing the ailment if the phrase were taken [away] from them.”
In the Journal of the American Medical Association (Nov. 30, 1946, p.821), an article entitled “Treatment of Charley Horse” described it as “injury to a muscle, usually the quadriceps femoris,” and “consists first in a contusion to the muscle, which results in a hematoma… [that later] may organize into a myositis ossificans, forming soft bone in the muscle.”
Such usage indicates, according to Coffin, the term has been “a part of even the most formal American English for a quarter of a century.”
