It's been reported that my nephew in Ottawa needs to be encouraged to read, but he doesn't need to be encouraged to do sports. With this in mind I ventured into an unfamiliar genre. Sports books seem to come in two flavours—how-to books (which most twelve-year-olds don't need) and glitzy-biographies of American super-jocks—but then I found an obscure book called The Name of the Game: How Sports Talk Got That Way by Lafe Locke (Better-way), a sports book that's also about words.

Now I know that "gymnastics" comes from two Greek words that mean "to exercise naked," and that it was originally restricted to male participants (now that would have been worth seeing). I still can't figure out how tennis is scored, but the word "love" is from the French word "l'oeuf" meaning "egg," which is shaped like a zero. The Name of the Game got me reading about sports, so maybe it got my nephew reading.