the.com/scoreboard
the cold arithmetic of glory that doesn't care how you feel about it
means A scoreboard is a large display, usually at a sports venue, that shows the current scores and other key details of a game in progress.
from A plain compound of "score" plus "board." "Score" itself has a wonderfully concrete past: it comes from Old Norse "skor," meaning a notch or tally cut into a stick or wall to keep count — the same root that gives us the number twenty (a "score"), since tallies were often grouped in twenties. "Board" is the old word for a flat plank or table. So a scoreboard is, quite literally, the board on which the notches are kept — the tally surface of the modern game, descended from a carved stick that nobody could argue with.
- original tech
- early ones used hand-flipped numbered cards
- trash talk
- athletes literally point at it to silence critics
- first electric
- debuted at a 1908 Chicago baseball park
- final word
- it remembers what excuses forget
wrigley field scoreboard — hand-operated manually by workers in the ivy-covered wall since 1937