If Argentina had prevailed against Germany in yesterday's World Cup final, you couldn't really have called it an upset. Germany had dominated during the past weeks of World Cup play, but Argentina had gone in as a strong contender. It was a hard fought game decided by a single goal scored in extra time. Neither an upset nor its opposite.
Which brings up an interesting vocabulary question: What would a word for the opposite of an upset be? Do we have one in English? To our ears, inevitability feels too open-and-shut, coronation is too much a figurative stretch, and trouncing leaves no room to credit the hypothetical David who fights hard in a contest where Goliath ultimately wins.
Last year, Vocabulary.com lexicographer Ben Zimmer wrote about the origins of upset as a sporting term, debunking the legend that it "came to be because an unfavored horse named Upset beat the great thoroughbred Man o' War" in 1919. Zimmer finds upset being used in a sporting context as far back as 1857, and pieces together a story of upset's origin that travels into the history of women's suffrage and the misspelling of diphthong. The name of the 1919 horse, Zimmer concludes, was no eponym. Rather it was an aptonym. (For more on these delightful -onym constructions, see "What's in a -Nym?.")
What doesn't play a role in upset's origin story is an upset antonym, and one can't but help wonder why. Is it a sad pronouncement on our veneration of anyone who wins that we don't distinguish between a win that's hard fought and one that's more expected? Are we just so used to the strong man taking home the trophy that it's something we don't bother remarking upon? And isn't noticing this about our culture, well, sort of upsetting?
Now that's a sense of upset we can attach an antonym to! In fact, antonyms abound when upset means "distressed or unhappy." And last week, a contributor to the New York Times Metropolitan Diary even noted a homonym for this sense of the word. Sort of. The Diary contributor wrote that while she was en route to the hospital and visibly upset, a cab driver asked her to explain the difference between obsessed and upset. Thinking about the distinction -- upset is a word many use when in denial about being angry; obsessed could be a more honest but less flattering description of the same mood -- served to take the woman's mind off her troubles. A life-cum-vocabulary lesson.
The words aren't true homonyms, of course, but they could easily be mistaken for them by an English language learner. (Call them a faux-monyms?) Mariah Carey, who varied the "Why you so obsessed with me?" refrain of her 2009 hit single "Obsessed" with the echoing line "It's clear that you're upset with me," was playing with the similarities of the two words also. As with the cabby's question, her song shows how language can work to confront irrational behavior by naming it as such.
So while we still have no word at the ready to describe Goliath-beats-David outcomes, our search has brought us to something useful, a faux-homonymic-wordplay meets emotional-intervention. This might come in handy to any of us who find ourselves upset by the trouncing of the underdogs of this world and the attendant, inevitable coronations of strong men.
Though it's probably not the first thing Argentinians want to hear the Monday after the game.