There was a time in my life when I was a grammar jerk. I corrected, I proselytized, I fussed, and I whinged. I got emails from my mother—my poor, loving mother—in which she worried that she would make a mistake. I’m not proud. Only an idiot would mix up who and whom, I would drawl to anyone who would listen, plus many more who very palpably hoped not to. Ever heard of the subjunctive, my fellow kids?
So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I approached Craig Gaines, The Ringer’s copy chief—as good, kind, and unjerkly a grammarian as anyone should ever hope to meet—with a question: What would he think if the NFL decided to make a little, tiny, itty-bitty word-related change? Just a small one, nothing more than a minute tweak to the name of an annual event—hardly something anyone should worry very much about. But, you know, maybe a thing that it would be good to have a copy editor weigh in on, possibly or probably before the publication of an impassioned declaration of support. What if, I asked, the NFL changed the name of its annual championship from “the Super Bowl” to just “the Superbowl”?
And then I waited in fear.
Maybe you pride yourself on grammatical rectitude; maybe you view the change from Internet to internet as a harbinger of moral decay. That’s fine. I get it; I do (and I hope you’re nice to your mother). You do not have to read this, unless you are Roger Goodell, and you do not have to send me a message to tell me what you think of it, unless to say: You’re right.
Because, my dear friends, I have thought long and hard about this and I have reached one inescapable conclusion: The Super Bowl must become the Superbowl.
Allow me to explain. Do we ever call it “the Bowl”? We do not. Do we think of “Super” as a modifier that might be applied to Super Bowl–associated subjects—Super matchup, Super quarterback, Super champion, Super Belichick? We do not; it is not a bowl that is super. It’s just the Super Bowl. Do we pause between the words? We do not. “Super” and “Bowl”: They are inextricable. There is no one without the other—and where there is just one thing, there ought to be just one word. As basket ball became basketball, as air planes became airplanes, as meat balls became meatballs, and as, most relevantly, Super-man became Superman—so must this compound word become, well, a compound.
As it stands, “Superbowl” is an astoundingly common mistake. How common? Well:
My friends, we are already living in the golden age of the Superbowl, a word that this past Super Bowl/Superbowl season received more than two-thirds as many hits on Google as “Super Bowl.” What time is the Superbowl? the good people of this nation want to know, the ones who’ve had some Bud Light or who only think about the game and its branding once a year or who just generally can’t be bothered to correct/proselytize/fuss/otherwise worry about their space bars—and they find out, of course, as Google gently course-corrects their searches.
But what if all those people are right? The masses cannot always be trusted, of course; they brought us Tim Tebow and the color “unicorn.” But language is a continental drift: toward simplicity and away from the Pangaea of Grumpy English People. This is not an occasion of mass ignorance so much as it is a subconscious, collective move toward the thing that makes sense. All those people, the millions upon millions who will spend the coming week and a half typing nine tidy characters into their search engines and texts and emails and blog posts? I think they’ve figured it out. We say it as one word. We use it as one word. Mightn’t we go ahead and spell it as one word, too?
You’re mad. I’m sorry. I warned you! But OK: Let’s take a step back. The Super Bowl was first played in 1967, when the rival National Football League and American Football League joined for the first time to compete in an end-of-season championship showdown. The 1967 match was known officially as the “AFL–NFL World Championship Game”; the next two were dubbed the same.
But even then, the name “Super Bowl” was in unofficial rotation. Over the years, Lamar Hunt, the former Chiefs owner, has been credited with coining the term. He claimed to have lifted it from a bouncy ball called a SuperBall, then a popular toy. “I was just sort of kidding at first when I mentioned ‘Super Bowl’ in the meetings,” Hunt told the Los Angeles Times in 1967. “But then the other owners started using it and the press picked it up.”
In reality, Hunt probably had nothing to do with it. As Henry D. Fetter wrote in The Atlantic in 2011, the name seems to have arisen more organically. A June 1966 story in The New York Times referenced “a new superduper football game for what amounts to the championship of the world”; a Los Angeles Times story a few months later noted the game was being “referred to by some as the Super Bowl.” As Fetter wrote, “Rather than owing its inspiration to any one person, whether Lamar Hunt or anyone else ... [the development of the name] appears more likely to have been the entirely natural, indeed even inevitable, manifestation of the proverbial ‘wisdom of crowds.’”
Again: the crowds. “Super Bowl” seemed, surely, like an ideal name: In 1967, it was perfectly natural to call a big football game a “bowl” and to give a really big football game the appellation “super.” But super (synonyms: big, definitive, almighty) has, as all great words must, fallen out of common parlance; bowl games are now shorthand for postseason college-football showdowns. And so we’re left with a Super Bowl that is not really super and not really a bowl, either. It is its own thing entirely: the Superbowl.
So as the crowds once named the game, let them now rename it. And long may the Superbowl reign.
Craig took a minute to get back to me. Had I offended him? Was I fired? Did he call in the copy special ops? Could the Super Bowl ever become the Superbowl?
“My first reaction was a resolute no!” he responded eventually.
Oh no. Some words that followed: “copy editors” and “threw a fit” and “established precedent” and “no confusion” and “Superbowl would be a sad deflation of the term.”
“But”—but!—“I thought about it more this morning,” he wrote. “The Super Bowl was first played in 1967—65 years after the first Rose Bowl and 32 years after the first Orange and Sugar bowls. So its naming convention at the time of its founding reflected both its college predecessors and prevailing usage in that era (which favored open compounds). The Super Bowl was never some idealized, Disneyfied competition, but it was a much humbler affair when it was founded.”
Now, though, it is something else: a bigger, showier, brandier affair. “So, if you look at it through this lens ... streamlining it to the more consumerist-friendly Superbowl would make perfect sense.”
Well. A little dark, maybe, and not quite the declaration of the people’s right to simplicity and a modern truth. But on this, at least, we agree: “Just please,” he wrote, “please don’t make it SuperBowl.”
