Table Tennis Scoring rules

A novice tennis fan would not be blamed for being confused about who is winning a tennis match since one must learn the language of tennis scores to appreciate the game. Unlike soccer, basketball, and baseball, which simply count points for every goal, basket, and run, tennis has a scoring system (and lexicon) all its own.

At the beginning of the game, when both sides have no score, the game is love-love because in tennis, love means having a score of zero or nil. One point brings a player to 15, two to 30; and three to 40. The next point wins the game, unless a complex series of tiebreakers comes into play because in order to win a tennis match, a player must win by a margin of two. Where did the game gets its affectionate score for zero? The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the term might be rooted in the colloquial phrase “for love, ” meaning “without stakes being wagered.” This theory reflects the sport’s long history of etiquette and sportsmanship. Others theorize that love arose from the French word for “egg, ” l’oeuf, because a zero on a scoreboard resembles an egg. This is a clever claim, but it remains unsubstantiated.

Tennis might have ended up with a different name altogether. Major Walter Wingfield, who laid down the rules for modern tennis, had another name for tennis. He called it sphairistike, based on the Greek phrase “skill in playing at ball.” The word tennis most likely comes from the French word tenetz — meaning “hold!” — the imperative conjugation of the verb tenir. Etymologists hypothesize that this was an early command used in the game, but there is no firm evidence to support this.

Have you heard other theories about why love is used in tennis?

Pennsylvania Grocery Workers Achieve Higher Living Standards.

Food Weekly News November 13, 2008 United Food & Commercial Workers Local 23 members who work for Penn Traffic BiLo ratified a new three year agreement by a four to one margin on October 23, 2008. The new pact increases full-time employees wages by $1.20 per hour and part-time employees will receive between $.90 per hour to $1.70 per hour increase. web site bilo weekly ad

Employee health benefits will remain intact and future increases will be borne by the company up to 15% annually. Contributions to the Legal and Scholarship Fund were increased and most employees will get another paid personal day and three paid sick days annually.

The UFCW represents more than 1.3 million workers, primarily in the retail and meatpacking, food processing and poultry industries.

For more information, call Anthony M. Helfer, Secretary Treasurer of UFCW Local 23 at 724-514-3228.

While “Hannibal” has been killing ‘em at the box office – it surpassed $100 million in just 10 days – two DVDs for the movie that spawned the sequel, “The Silence of the Lambs, ” are nowhere to be found. They don’t go out of print officially until March 1, when the rights to “The Silence of the Lambs” revert to “Hannibal” studio MGM, but demand spurred by the current film has made the DVDs largely unavailable.

There are two versions of the “Silence” DVD – a bare-bones widescreen release from Image ($29.99) and a special edition from the Criterion Collection ($39.95). The highly recommended Criterion disc has clearly become the version of choice.

Criterion, which pioneered the use of supplemental material in laserdisc days, slathered on the extras for its widescreen DVD: a tightly edited commentary track by director Jonathan Demme, stars Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, screenwriter Ted Tally and FBI agent John Douglas; deleted scenes; film-to-storyboard comparisons; more storyboards; the FBI crime classification manual, and quotes from convicted serial killers.

MGM is expected to release its own DVD by the end of the year, but some extras, such as the commentary, probably will be different, because Criterion owns them.

Such is the reputation of Criterion that its “Silence” DVD was the No. 1 seller last week at online retailer Amazon, even though there were no copies available. It went to the top of the sales chart just from people clicking on the “buy” button, hoping for a straggler copy.