30 March—The big news today is without question the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, also known as the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, the University Boat Race, and just The Boat Race. It’s actually a set of races between eight-person shells of boat clubs of the so-called blue-brick universities held on the Thames around London, a venue geographically convenient to Oxford; in 1944 and 2021, however, exigency demanded The Race be conducted over the Great Ouse, geographically convenient to Cambridge. The course is just over four miles.

Men have been manning the shells since 1829. Women weren’t admitted as students at Oxford and Cambridge in the good old days, but that changed in the late nineteenth century and they were actually granted degrees by 1927 when they were allowed to woman [sic] eights in The Race. There are as yet no coed crews. That we know of.

Over the years, Cambridge has managed to defeat Oxford a little more often than Oxford has prevailed.

The little Thames River in Connecticut is quite logically mispronounced just as it’s spelled. In Blighty, however, the River Thames is pronounced Tems. And Featherstonehaugh is pronounced Fanshaw and Cholmondeley is pronounced Chumley. And scones are skahns. But Thame, a suburb of Oxford, is pronounced Tame, as is the little River Tame.

The origin of the name Thames is open to question. Before the Romans invaded, the river was in fact called Tems, just as it is today, but the Romans naturally Latinized to Tamesis, perhaps by joining Tems with Isis, which is what people in the Oxford environs may have called it way back then and still do. In the various Old English dialects it was Tamyse, harking back to the Latin. It’s been Thames (Tems) all over (except in Connecticut) since the seventeenth century.

No idea how the H made it into Thames. But consensus among etymologists these days is that the name is derived from the Sanskrit Tamasa, meaning Dark Water or Dark River, with the use of the word having migrated from India to Britain through the Celts. (Yes, they traded even back then.)

There’s only one River Great Ouse, but there are a few called just plain Ouse, including one in the Orkneys; the Great Ouse is, as you’d expect, the longest of the lot; and the River Little Ouse is a tributary. All the Ouses are in the United Kingdom and are pronounced Ooze. Except the one in Ontario that’s pronounced Grand River, having been renamed thus. There’s also a town in Tasmania called Ouse and pronounced Ooze.

The word ouse, by the way, is particularly significant for Americans because it comes, through Old English, from the Celtic word for water. And that word is usa. Or, as we prefer, USA . . .