Where Did The Word Gambling Originate

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Where does the word gambling originate from

And I have always hated tie-dye.

Dear Word Detective: Exactly what is a “rounder”? One example of the term’s use is in a fairly obscure Grateful Dead song titled, “On The Road Again.” Here is the line as it appears in the song: “Went to my house the front door was locked, Went ’round to my window, but my window was locked, Jumped right back, shook my head, Big old rounder in my folding bed. Jumped into the window, broke the glass, Never seen that little rounder run so fast.” — Alex Williams.

So it’s come to this, has it? Decoding Grateful Dead lyrics? That way lies madness. Speaking as a former mid-range Dead fan (I own maybe four albums and have no plans to ever buy another), I sincerely doubt that most of their lyrics actually mean anything. Yes, I know there are people who regard “Ripple” as a deep philosophical statement, but those tend to be the same people who are really, really good at rolling their own cigarettes. All I know is that if I never hear “Casey Jones” or “Truckin'” again, it’ll be ten years too soon.

I looked up the lyrics to “On the Road Again” and found some minor differences from those you supplied, but the gist is the same. This is, by the way, not the same song as Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again.” The Dead billed “On the Road Again” as a “traditional” tune, which they merely arranged. The narrator of the song is a man who has married a “bad girl” and has discovered, quelle surprise, that her “badness” has persisted past the wedding reception.

As to what the “rounder” might be, there are a number of possibilities. As a noun, “rounder” carries the general sense of “one who goes around,” or follows a route in some sense, as a salesman might have in the 19th and early 20th centuries. When the term “rounder” first appeared in English in the 17th century, it meant a military officer who was assigned to “make the rounds” of guard posts at a base or camp to make sure the sentries were awake and alert (“In our modern Wars … sometime the Rounder will clap a musket-shot through a sleepy head,” 1624). “Rounder” was used in the 19th century to mean a minister who traveled “on rounds” on Sunday, and the word was also used as a short form of “roundsman,” an indigent laborer who was sent around to work for various farmers, his wages being partly paid by the local church. “Rounder” is also used in Britain, in the plural form “rounders,” as the name of a game similar to baseball in which a batter hits a ball and runs around the bases.

In US slang, however, a “rounder,” since the mid-19th century, has been a person, usually a man, who makes rounds of a different and less pleasant sort. A “rounder” makes “the rounds” from bars to prisons to flophouses and back to bars again (“The regular rounders who are beginning to receive long sentences under the new drunkenness law,” 1891). The term was also used to mean an itinerant railway worker, but I suspect that the author of “On the Road Again” had the “chronic drunk and convict” sense of the word in mind.

Today I found out the origin of the term “jackpot”.

Where Does The Word Gambling Originate From

Jackpot originally popped up around the 1870s and was from the poker game “Jacks or Better”. This is much like traditional five card draw, except in this case, if a player does not have a pair of “jacks or better” in the first round of betting, he has to pass. This doesn’t necessarily mean he has to be holding a pair of jacks, queens, or the like. It just means that he has to be holding cards that will beat a pair of tens.

Where did the word gamble come from

Once the first person who has that has placed a bet in the opening betting round, the rest of the participants are free to bet as they will, regardless of the cards they hold. In the case where nobody holds “jacks or better”, the hand must be re-dealt with additional ante required, so the pot can grow just from antes.

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When the game is finally over, no player is allowed to win with anything less than three of a kind or better. If, at the end, no one has better than three of a kind or more, then no player gets the pot and the hand is re-dealt with additional ante required to be added to the existing accumulated pot. Over time this pot can potentially grow quite large, hence “jackpot”.

Within a few decades of the term “jackpot” in poker popping up, the term morphed into a slang term for “trouble with the law”, and further morphed by the mid-20th century to primarily be associated with “hitting the jackpot” with slot machines. From there, it became even more figurative, referring to any big prize or good turn of events.

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Bonus Facts:

  • Ante comes from the Latin “ante”, meaning “before”, which in turn came from the Proto-Indo-European “*anti”, meaning “facing opposite, before, or in front of”.
  • Actor Jimmy Stewart, who incidentally was a two star General in the U.S. Military , once starred in one of his more obscure movies called “Jackpot”. The movie was based on a true story of a man, James P. Caffrey, who won $24,000 (about $210,000 today) worth of random and sometimes bizarre merchandise (on August 28, 1948). In the movie itself, Stewart’s character wins such a prize from a radio contest, the same as the real life Caffrey. Unfortunately, there’s no cash involved yet the character is of course obligated to pay a lot of money in taxes, approximately $7000 that he doesn’t have (his annual salary being just $4500, or about $41,000 today). He then sets about trying to sell the merchandise, but loses his job over it; then later gets arrested as the police think he’s fencing stolen goods. 🙂
  • “Operation Jackpot” was a U.S. crackdown on marijuana smugglers in the 1980s. Over 3 years of work was spent by this very expensive task force to try to catch about 100 such smugglers, including the “gentlemen smugglers” who were college educated smugglers who abhorred violence (but apparently liked marijuana). Unfortunately for those trying to arrest these individuals, they proved quite slippery and many avoided being arrested for some time. In fact, the last such arrest from Operation Jackpot took place just five years ago in 2007.
  • Another of the “war on drugs” operations was “Operation Pipe Dreams” in 2003, which was a nationwide United States investigation which targeted business selling drug paraphernalia. In the end, hundreds of businesses and homes were raided nationwide. 55 people were charged with trafficking of illegal drug paraphernalia and eventually fined and generally given home detentions. The estimated cost of the operation was around twelve million dollars or about $220,000 per person charged and about 2,000 officers involved or about 36 officers per charge.
  • One of the earliest documented instances of Poker being played was from 1829 by English actor Joseph Crowell. He stated he played the game in New Orleans that year using a deck of 20 cards and four players, each getting five cards, with bets placed after the cards were dealt. In the early days of Poker, it was common to use fewer cards the fewer people were playing. The game is thought to have spread from New Orleans up the Mississippi on river boats where gambling was extremely popular.
  • One trick as to when to bluff and when not (to optimize one’s chance of coming out ahead over many hands) is to use a randomizing agent to help you determine whether to bluff or not, such as deriving a randomizing method off of the exact time when the hand is dealt or some mental randomizer using the number of cards of a certain color in your hand or the like. When using these tricks, you should also factor in the general odds of winning the bluff, partially based on how many people are in the game and how much you have to put in vs. how much the pot is worth.

Where Did The Word Gamble Come From

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