What does a nineteenth century baseball story have to do with my pain?

02 November 2001

Yesterday I was talking to a colleague, with my hands in my pockets, and I turned around to walk away and ran my arm smack into the sharp corner of the half-height office partition behind me. Since my hand was in my pocket, my arm was right up against my body, and bore the brunt of all of my body's momentum against the corner.

My skin was only scraped, since there was too much direct force to cause any real sliding against the corner, but instead I got a very nasty deep painful bruise. I remarked that it was like getting a Charley Horse, and my colleagues went "What? What the hell's a Charley Horse?" and I tried to explain that in America we use the term for a muscle cramp, usually in the leg, but they didn't believe me.

So we went looking on the internet and lo and behold, we found it (once we figured out it was spelled "Charley" and not "Charlie" - the latter will return about a hundred pages relating to some pizza thing). Apparently back in the late 1800's there was a guy called Charley who worked for the White Sox, and he had a lame horse that walked with a limp. So when someone got a cramp and hobbled about, they said he had a Charley Horse.

Knowing that my pain had a name made me feel so much better.