In her new book “Hard Choices,” Hillary Clinton writes of the 2012 embassy attack in Benghazi, Libya, “I will not be a part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans.”
We are used to hearing about “slugfests” in the pugnacious political arena. But before entering politics, this all-American word first had to slug it out in two sports: professional boxing and baseball.
In boxing, “slugging” has referred to landing heavy punches since the mid-nineteenth century. (In British usage, it often appeared as “slogging.”) “Slug” was then grafted on to “-fest,” a merrymaking suffix inspired by such German festivities as the beer-soaked “Oktoberfest.” Thanks to the lexical contributions of German immigrants, Americans would eventually spin off the suffix for everything from “gabfests” to “sobfests,” but “slugfests” came first.
The earliest use that I have discovered in historical databases relates to the plans for a prizefight between two of boxing’s original superstars: “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and “Ruby Bob” Fitzsimmons. Organizers wanted to hold the bout in Hot Springs, Ark., in late 1895, and the Denver Post reported that arrangements were under way to provide enough trains for the tens of thousands of visitors expected “during the three days of the slugfest.”
Early on, then, “slugfest” could mean something like “boxing festival.” This particular festival never happened because the governor of Arkansas forbade the fight and arrested Corbett and Fitzsimmons at the border when they tried to enter the state. The title fight wouldn’t take place until 1897 when Carson City, Nev., hosted the event, again heralded by some newspapers as a “slugfest.”
The word quickly narrowed its meaning to refer to a fight marked by heavy blows, at a time when such blows could be lethal. Then, in the summer of 1903, baseball reporters gravitated toward “slugfest” as a way to describe games featuring many hits, the opposite of a low-scoring “pitcher’s duel.”
Baseball had already borrowed “slugger” from boxing, and the heavy-hitting sluggers who participated in slugfests would soon have their own statistic, “slugging percentage,” to measure their offensive prowess.
As is so often the case, hard-nosed sporting slang transitioned into politics. A 1935 editorial in the Baltimore Sun warned that New Deal Democrats might “leave the doors open for a slugfest with the Republicans.” Two years later, Variety reported on a public spat between Manhattan district attorney candidates Thomas E. wey and Charles A. Schneider under the headline, “CBS Referees Political Slugfest.” In the vast majority of political slugfests, however, the punches that land are strictly metaphorical.