Who Knew?

So here I was, just minding my own business and brushing up on some three-dimensional Euclidean geometry, when I came across this nifty little bit of trivia.

It's generally accepted (and the factual basis for mucho legal precedent in the painful divorce proceedings of each of my twelve failed marriages) that a lot of years ago, God tried to chop down a pesky weed of an apple tree in the Garden of Eden so he could build a beer tree there, but swerved at the last minute and decided to hit Eve between the legs with the axe instead. And since we know that some wannabe hipster named Euclid descended from Eve's Mighty Bloodied Wound itself, and further, because we know that women fight like girls and therefore don't really fight at all but rather, pull each other's hair out, we can unequivocally conclude that yes, women came before men fighting for sport and therefore, that women came before boxing. But I would never have guessed that "Boxing" came after "box."


box (n.1.)
O.E. box "a wooden container," also "type of shrub," from L.L. buxis, from Gk. pyxis "boxwood box," from pyxos "box tree," of uncertain origin. Ger. Büchse also is a Latin loan word. Slang meaning "vulva" is attested 17c., according to "Dictionary of American Slang;" modern use seems to date from c.WWII, perhaps originally Australian, and on notion of "box of tricks." Boxy is attested from 1861. Box office is 1786; in the figurative sense of "financial element of a performance" it is first recorded 1904.

box (n.2.)
"a blow," c.1300, of uncertain origin, possibly related to M.Du. boke, M.H.G. buc and Dan. bask, all meaning "a blow," perhaps imitative. The verb meaning "to fight with the fists" is from 1560s. Boxing as a sport is first recorded 1711.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. Does this mean that we men could have had it a lot easier all this time had we just gone to the Box Office first?