Names for the number 0 in English a formal reading of a team's scoresheet. There is no definitive origin for the tennis score name for 0, "love". It firstly occurred in English, is of comparatively recent origin, and is not used in other languages. The most commonly believed hypothesis is that it is derived from English speakers mis-hearing the French "l'œuf", "the egg", which was the name for a score of zero used in French, because the symbol for a zero used on the scoreboard was an elliptical zero symbol, which visually resembled an egg. There is tangential support for this in the use of "duck" as
Ascent of the A-Word the book as an "often raucously funny account of what seems to be America’s most popular insult" which manages to be neither "exceedingly snarky" nor "overly academic and pretentious". Ascent of the A-Word Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years is a 2012 book by the American linguist Geoffrey Nunberg which analyzes the history of the epithet "asshole". In "Ascent", Nunberg traces to World War II the origins of the word as an epithet, when it was used as a term of abuse for superior officers considered abusive or self-important. Following the soldiers' return home from the war,