Today’s word of the day, thanks to Dictionary.com, is milestone. Milestone is a noun that refers to “a significant event or stage in someone’s life” (https://www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-day/). This meaning of milestone is metaphorical, but the word’s original meaning was quite literal: “stone or pillar set up on a highway or other line of travel to mark the distance in miles” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/milestone), a word that appears in English around 1746. It can, according to etymonline.com, be written as mile-stone.

Milestone is a compound word (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)). The linguistic process involved is called, oddly, compounding (or composition or nominal composition [in linguistics nominal refers to something that is nounlike in its uses]. In this process two or more stems (words that can stand by themselves) are put together to form a new word (or lexeme). Compounds can be closed (i.e. with no space between), such as milestone, hyphenated, such as mile-stone, or open, such as high school. If the two parts of a word, such employment, are not both stems (i.e. if one of the parts is a prefix or a suffix such as –ment), then the word is a result of morphological derivation. In other words, the noun employment is derived from the verb employ.

The Germanic languages are somewhat notorious for compounding, and such compounds are usually closed compounds. And such compounds can be quite long. For example, “In 1999, the government of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern enacted new rules for the labelling of beef products. The legislation was called the Cattle Marketing and Beef Labelling Supervision Duties Delegation Law, or Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindflesichetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz” (https://sjquillen.medium.com/why-does-german-have-so-many-longwords-e13e867aa076).

English has a tendency to put spaces between the stems when it compounds. I did a little research, and I found several theories about why English is different from those other Germanic languages. One suggested that the difference began after the Norman invasion in 1066 because the scribes for the next few hundred years spoke French, and French does not compound as much as the Germanic languages. But another person said that one finds open compounds in Old English literature, though the way Old English documents were written it must be hard to tell whether the compounds are open or closed. Another person suggested that the orthographic deviation may have begun with the Latin scholars on the 17^th century, though I cannot remember a lot of long compounds in Shakespeare’s work or even in Chaucer’s. Then again, I do remember when Steppenwolf released an album in 1970 with an instrumental called “Earschplittenloudenboomer.”

If you follow association football, you may be aware that Goodison Park, home of the Everton Toffees, is coming to its end as a Premier League site. The club has built a new stadium in Liverpool, at the Bramley-Moore Dock in Vauxhall. The new stadium will seat over 52,000 fans, as opposed to the under 40,000 at Goodison Park. And what will happen to the old stadium? Originally the plan was for Goodison Park to be torn down and replaced with a mixed-use development. People were even invited to “Own a piece of irreplaceable Everton history that you can treasure forever” (https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/take-piece-goodison-park-you-31469211).

But that plan has changed. Now Goodison Park will become the home of the Everton women’s team (https://news.sky.com/story/goodison-park-will-become-new-home-of-everton-women-as-stadium-is-saved-from-demolition-13367318). According to Sky News: “The move to save the stadium comes after The Friedkin Group (TFG), the club’s owners since December, assessed the project. The club said in a statement that after an ‘in-depth review’, TFG decided that ‘football must be kept at the heart of Everton’s community’. The statement said the move ‘addresses Everton Women’s rapid growth and need for a larger, more suitable venue than Walton Hall Park’.”

Goodison Park “was the first major football stadium built in England, has been home to the club’s men’s side since it opened in 1892” (ibid.). But it wasn’t used exclusively by the Everton men. During World War I, the Football Association suspended both league plan and the FA Cup. Many of the young men who played for the professional clubs left to volunteer to fight. The FA did permit play in smaller, regional leagues, but these games were not official. Many women took jobs in factories to replace the men who were across the Channel. And in some cases, the women formed football teams connected to the factories they worked in as a way of maintaining morale.

On December 26, 1920, Goodison Park hosted a match “between St Helen’s Ladies and their celebrated rivals, Dick, Kerr Ladies of Preston” (https://efcheritagesociety.com/goodison-park-and-womens-football/). The game drew a crowd of over 40,000, according to estimates at the time. “People swamped the surrounding streets, so the two teams needed a police escort to get safely into the stadium’s players’ entrance. Dick, Kerr, were simply too good for their Lancastrian rivals and struck four times without reply. Team captain Alice Kell bagged a hat-trick and was then presented with a trophy by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. Sadly, no photos of the great occasion survive. Gate receipts of £3,100 were donated to discharged soldiers’ and sailors’ funds in Liverpool” (ibid.). Women did not play as professionals in 1920, so gate receipts were always donated to charities.

The sad part of the story is that, fearing that the women’s game would impinge upon the fanbase of the men’s game, the FA soon after tried to ban women’s football: “Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, the Council feels impelled to express their strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged” (ibid.). The Council also complained that too much of the money from the gate was used for expenses and not enough for charity. The Council thus instructed football clubs to refuse to allow their parks to be used for such ladies’ matches. The ban did somewhat stymie the growth of women’s football in the UK, but it didn’t succeed completely.

And now, 105 years later, the oldest Premier League football park will be used exclusively for women’s football. Seems like a true milestone in equal rights.

Today’s image is of the Dick Kerr International Ladies AFC ( https://efcheritagesociety.com/goodison-park-and-womens-football/).