“‘It suddenly struck me the other day,’ continued Bernard, ‘that it might be possible to be an adult all the time.'” (Aldous Huxley, 94)
In 1963 when I was an undergraduate at a midwestern university, a famous poet (at that time such a thing still existed) was spending a year on campus as Poet in Residence. He was widely rumored to be homosexual (“gay” had not then become a synonym). A couple of English grad students and I went to a party in his apartment near the university. Next day, we were sitting around the graduate student lounge when another grad student, who hadn’t made it to the awkward soirée, came in and, leering at his compadres, asked, “Did he cornhole ya?”
“Cornhole” was then vulgar slang for anal sex, and that was the only meaning I knew for the word for much of my life. So I was somewhat startled when, surfing through the channels on my television set, I came upon the National Cornhole Championship on one of ESPN’s many spawn. The Championship wasn’t showing at that moment. A commercial message was portraying a number of hysterically happy senior citizens disporting themselves after they’d ingested some lethal drug. I waited impatiently through this to see what the National Cornhole Championships would consist of.
Essentially, they consisted of people throwing beanbags at a plank with a hole in it. I faintly recalled tossing beanbags around with my friends when I was five or six years old. I hadn’t seen one since, until now. I’d thought beanbags were something kids outgrew before they reached puberty. How had they entered the world of Professional Sports?
My initial internet search term, “Cornhole Game History,” led me first to the site “letsplaycornhole.com,” which offered what it described as a “True History of Cornhole Game.” That history, while shy – in fact, utterly devoid – of documentation, proved to be written in a prose so eccentrically and remotely related to English that I must quote from it liberally.
First alleging that more and more people are playing Cornhole, the site states that, “no one really knows the origins of the game and the cornhole game name” but that “there are multiple accounts all claiming to explain the history of cornhole game.”
The first account suggests that Cornhole began in Cincinnati, Ohio, but the site makes short work of that claim: “Although the annual cornhole tournament is normally held in Ohio, that in itself doesn’t make a solid claim to the game’s originality in Ohio.” Kentucky’s putative parentage is as easily dismissed: “Controversially, the same history also shows the game having traveled multiple paths throughout its entire history.” So much for Kentucky. In fact, so much for any “Midwestern town in Illinois or Indiana.” The whole debate over the origins of the game and its monicker “might all be but a moot. Cornhole game actually originated in Germany several hundred years ago and here’s all the evidence to show for it.” And here it is, verbatim:
“There’s a strong correlation between the origins of cornhole as an ancient civilization game and its founders, the early German emigrants.
“The civilization is thought to have taken massive interest in tossing rocks at holes dug in the ground as a past time which eventually fuelled the birth of cornhole as a game.
“Matthias Kueperman, an ancient German farmer is believed to have been the person who invented and perfected the game. It was in the year 1325 and Kueperman is said to have done all these in Bavaria in his own backyard.
“Cornhole historians hold that while Kueperman was taking a stroll during one of those fine spring days, he observed a group of kids really having fun throwing some heavy rocks into a hole dug in the ground. That instilled worry in him seeing that the kids could easily get hurt. Yet he lacked the will to stop them from doing what they seemed to enjoy best.
“From there henceforth, Kueperman decided to come up with a safer game based on what he had just observed.
“The said stones were found to weight about 1.13 pounds, which in old German language is an equivalent of 1 Pfund. The weight is seen to have been ideal for achieving 16 feet or thereabouts when tossed. Note that the stone’s hardness is to date potentially risky for every person who engages in the game.” Well, then. That clearly and convincingly (if you’re well short of reaching puberty) explains the game’s origins, but what about its name?
“The cornhole game name origin has been somewhat controversial, though, with a number of people rooting it to Jebediah McGillicuddy, another Midwestern farmer. It’s believed that Jebediah, a corn farmer, invented cornhole in an effort to counter boredom after tending to his chores whereby he engaged in the game with his friends and family so as to have quality time. However, there isn’t any solid evidence to support this claim. In fact, this story, unlike the Kueperman’s, is only heard from those residing in Kentucky.” Well, we know what they’re like.
Now for a brief return to world history: “Later on, this whole new invention resulted in unforeseen repercussions as the making of the goal board eventually brought forth deforestation which raised alarm amongst woodworkers.
“As a consequence, noble wood merchants looked for help from their lord which later on resulted in the implementation of the corn laws of Britain during the 15th century. Exorbitant taxes were imposed on corn imports which in effect took a tool on the production of corn bags. Soon after, cornhole tournaments became costly.
“As a result, the game became quickly forgotten and slowly disappeared into oblivion. Thankfully, this never lasted long as the cornhole game, hundred years later, resurfaced again in the regions of Cincinnati.
“According to historians, Cincinnati bears strong German roots and so it’s believable that Matthias Kueperman’s story bears weighty truths in it . . . . All these truths sum up everything you might want to know about cornhole’s true origin and the history of cornhole game name came about . . . . It’s rare nowadays to observe any college football and not see multitudes of people playing cornhole.”
Call me a cynic, but anytime I encounter such a plethora of passive voices (“is thought, is believed, is said, is seen, it’s believed, is only heard, were imposed, became quickly forgotten, it’s believable”) in a few paragraphs, it takes a tool on my credulity. But it did so only because I failed initially to recognize that I was reading what Jules Henry dubbed “pecuniary pseudo truth – which may be defined as a false statement made as if it were true, but not intended to be believed. No proof is offered to a pecuniary pseudo-truth, and no one looks for it” (Jules Henry, 47).
I remained unsure I’d found the true history of this latest professional sport, even though my skepticism might only be a moot. Delving on, I came upon more plausible accounts. Stacey Moore, I found, “talked about how his family had started a semi-pro basketball league that ended up failing. Stacey was able to take those learning on what had worked before and transferred it to the ACL. He started his research and development by going to college tailgates to see if there was proof of concept.” Evidently those tailgates provided sufficient proof of concept that “[Moore’s American Cornhole League] have a 3 year deal on ESPN and are one of the most popular sports on the network. Even celebrities are interested” (https://upreneur.com/2020/10/21/stacey-moore-commissioner-founder-of-the-american-cornhole-league/).
Another claimant to the Originator’s title, Frank Geers, who founded the American Cornhole Organization in 2005, explained his impetus thus: ” I got involved with cornhole as an extension of my marketing company Harris Hawk 15 years ago, when I was looking for better ways to help my clients market themselves. I stumbled across the idea of cornhole. It was a simple yet fun game, and the boards and bags were billboards waiting to happen. We could logo the product to help market our clients’ brands” (https://musebycl.io/sports/bag-man-how-frank-geers-growing-sport-cornhole).
“Billboards waiting to happen” – what better example could be found of what Rex Sorgatz has dubbed “Toyetic . . . a nasty neologism, forged for this synthetic era of synergistic entertainment experiences . . . . An adjective initially coined to describe a movie’s potential to generate revenue from toys . . . the definition of the term has evolved to encompass all possible merchandising opportunities for any type of media property” (Sorgatz, 213).
I was beginning to get the idea that the sport of cornhole might be more about marketing than about Matthias Kueperman’s concern for the safety of rock-throwing children. This suspicion was cemented into certainty as I kept investigating cornhole sites and finding that the first thing they all wanted to show me was a photographic catalog of products (a typical sample: $130 – $225 for variously illustrated boards with holes in them; $20-40 for beanbags; Cornhole score tower&drink holder combo $40). In most cases, that was also the only thing they wanted to show me.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley had envisioned the necessary connection between consumption and games: ” ‘Strange,’ mused the Director [of Hatcheries and Conditioning], as they turned away, ‘strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated existing games’ (Huxley, 31) The Controllers would have abhorred beanbag and insisted it be transmogrified into Cornhole.
“. . . even in our Ford’s day” suggests the reason the Controllers would have embraced Cornhole. The society imagined in Brave New World derives from the techniques of mass production that Henry Ford did so much to pioneer. The World State’s motto is Community, Identity, Stability, and the Director explains why endless, and endlessly increasing, consumption is the necessary foundation for all three: “The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning – for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to run. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.” (Huxley, 42)
While mass production has not alone been responsible for the explosion of human population, it has certainly accompanied that explosion and become its sole and necessary economic system. Considering advertising aimed directly at children in 1963, Jules Henry observed, “In contemporary America children must be trained to insatiable consumption of impulsive choice and infinite variety” (Henry, 70). In Huxley’s imagined society, this training is carried out in the World Government’s human hatcheries/conditioning centers by means of sleep teaching, the nightly repetition of messages such as “Ending is Better Than Mending” that teach future citizens to abhor the old and throw it away as soon as possible, that the machine may keep on turning.
Another necessity in the Brave New World is that human language be reduced to a near-infantile level, in order to assure stability and render critical thought or its expression impossible. So people learn to wear such items as zippicamiknicks and zippyjamas, to sing such popular love ballads as “”Hug me till you drug me, honey/
Kiss me till I’m in a coma/ Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny/ Love’s as good as soma.”
In our own society, rejection of the past and language degradation, while the government contributes to the efforts, are primarily the responsibility of the advertising industry. Cornhole Worldwide is doing its part to reduce the language to infantile babble by offering an exhaustive list of
“Best Cornhole Slang You Must Know:
#1. Cornament: A cornhole tournament
How to use it: ‘I’m having a cornament this weekend. Do you want to join the bracket?’
#2. Holy Moly Triple Cornholy: Three cornholes in a row
How to use it: ‘Holy moly triple cornholy! That was one of the best turns I have ever seen!’
#3. Cornstar; An extremely confident cornhole player
How to use it: ‘They are a family of cornstars! They never miss shot with their perfect technique!’
#4. Cornholed: When a stray bag hits you
How to use it: ‘Watch where you throw, I got cornholed right in the face!’
#5. Skunk / Whitewash / Shutout: Finishing the game with zero points
How to use it: ‘We skunked in the cornament. We couldn’t get a bag on the board.’
#6. Shucked: What you are if you are losing or lost the game
How to use it: ‘We are going to be shucked unless we do something fast.’
#7. The Great Cornholio*: Four cornholes in a turn
How to use it: ‘Did you see that?! They got a Great Cornholio!’
*Also known as a Gusher, Jumanji, Double Deuce, Catorce, Cornzilla, Four Bagger, 12 pack, Golden Sombrero, and Galbraith.
#8. ‘Get that corn out of my face!’ :What you say when you stop your opponent from scoring
How to use it: ‘You really thought you could make that shot? Get that corn out of my face!’
#9. Cornfusion: Disagreement about scoring and points
How to use it: ‘There was a lot of cornfusion after my dad got three cornholes in a row.’
#10. Corn on the cob / Leprechaun / Four-leaf clover: When all four bags land on the board
How to use it: ‘You must be pretty lucky to get a leprechaun on your first toss.’
#11. Sally*: A weak toss
How to use it: ‘He calls himself a cornstar but he only throws sallies.’
*Also known as Candy Corn, Short Toss, Suzy, Mary, Corn Patty, and Weak Sauce.
#12. Nothing But Hole/ Airmail: A bag straight in the hole that doesn’t ever touch the board
How to use it: ‘She is the Michael Jordan of cornhole. She airmailed it with nothin’ but corn.’
#13. Cornholer: One who plays cornhole fanatically
How to use it: ‘I’m a huge cornholer! I even own a custom cornhole board and play every weekend!’
#14. Cornado: A player that has the highest points and is on a roll
How to use it: ‘Get that corn out of my face! I’m the cornado here.’
#15. Dirt Bag: A bag on or touching the ground (and anyone who cheats in cornhole)
How to use it: ‘I really thought I had that throw, but it turned out to be a dirt bag.'”
Perhaps I’m merely reacting like those English-teacher fuddy-duddies back in the 1960s who made such a nuisance about the slogan “Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should,” insisting that it should be “. . . As a Cigarette Should.” Perhaps the fractured grammar, syntax and spelling that characterize the various Cornhole sites, and the fanciful historical characters and events (Mathas Kueperman, Jebediah McGillicuddy, 15th-Century corn laws) they advance as “true history,” are merely more instances of Henry’s pecuniary pseudo truth, just Business As Usual. Perhaps I am silly to quail at internet headlines like the following:
“Tinder makes it easier to see if you vibe with someone’s Spotify taste
Now DuckDuckGo is building its own desktop browser
Clippy will return as an emoji in some Microsoft apps
BoohooMAN Drops DaBaby After His Hateful And Ignorant Comments Go Viral
Google has a cute little Wordle Easter egg
Yes, Topanga is married to the Cinnamon Toast Crunch shrimp tail guy”
Goo-goo talk has, after all, infested popular culture since at least the 1920s – oop boop-a doop. But the ascendance of pecuniary pseudo truth to our primary, acceptable (and almost universally accepted) form of discourse might have a few more seriously negative consequences. Author Jonathan Dee, considering the language of advertising, observed, “The real violence, though, lies not in the ways in which these messages are forced upon us but in the notion they embody that words can be made to mean anything, which is hard to distinguish from the idea that words mean nothing” (Dee, 67). Social critic Neil Postman argues that our growing replacement of written language with imagery (which, we are discovering, can be infinitely manipulable) has been disastrous: “Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them . . . the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life . . . we are getting sillier by the minute” (Postman, 24). If you don’t believe him, ask BoohooMAN.
Given the spreading, unfocused rage and assertions of “alternate facts” that have swept the world over the past few years, “sillier” might be putting it too mildly. It appears to me undeniable that more and more people are accepting absurdities and paranoid fantasies as reality, and acting upon them in the real world, where the rest of us must contend with their madness.
I have no idea what the “far right” (whatever that may mean) finds objectionable about butterflies, for example, yet I am informed by Google news that “Texas butterfly sanctuary forced to close after far-right threats.” Not only butterflies are threatened: “Two Los Angeles officers fired for ignoring robbery to play Pokémon Go.”
In fact, pretty much everyone is threatened: “Battlefield 2042 Reportedly Sold 4.23 Million Units in its First Week,” Google news reports happily, and “Call of Duty is getting a ‘new Warzone experience’ in 2022.” The carnage in such games becomes ever more convincingly “realistic,” visually speaking, and more and more players seem to be transferring their taste for imaginary violence into the real thing. In a few short days at the end of last year, “Oxford school shooting – latest: Suspect ‘used gun his dad bought on Black Friday,’ “A 14-year-old was chased and shot 18 times while waiting for a bus in Philadelphia,” “Tennessee shooting at high school basketball game leaves 1 dead, 1 critical,” and “Suspect in Michigan high school shooting charged with first-degree murder.”
When television was demonstrated at the New York world’s fair in 1939, E. B. White foresaw our brave new world of alternate reality with remarkable clarity: “Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere…. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images – distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals. A door closing, heard over the air; a face contorted, seen in a panel of light – these will emerge as the real and the true; and when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face the impression will be of mere artifice. I like to dwell on this quaint time, when the solid world becomes make-believe…when all is reversed and we shall be like the insane, to whom the antics of the sane seem the crazy twistings of a grig” (White 3).
I think it’s most accurate to view Cornhole as a transitional stage, standing between actual human games or sports and the virtual games of our emerging digitized future. Like Brave New World’s Centrifugal Bumble-puppy or Obstacle Golf, Cornhole refers back to those games we used to play sheerly for fun and exercise, suggesting that they are similar products of humanity (as we are still in the habit of viewing ourselves) rather than tools of the digital economy. Such games are meant to reassure those dwindling few citizens who can recall a different past that they are living in an improved version of that past, that they are still humans, still protagonists with free will. Very likely such games will fade out rather quickly as virtual reality capability is universally wired into the next generation of infants. Who needs beanbag when you can fly to Betelgeuse and fornicate with the heavy-breasted aliens of your choice after you’ve blasted the competition to pieces? Beanbag can only lead to cornfusion.
Works Cited (in order of appearance):
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Harper Perennial Classics, 1998
Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, Random House, 1963
Rex Sorgatz, The Encyclopedia of Misinformation, Abrams, 2018
Jonathan Dee, ”But Is it Advertising?” Harper’s, January 1999
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Viking, 1985
E.B. White, One Man’s Meat, Harper’s, 1944
