the.com/scorer
The person whose job is to judge everyone else's job while doing none of it.
means Someone who keeps the official tally of points, goals, or marks in a game or test, turning performance into a number.
from Simply 'score' plus the agent suffix '-er' — 'one who scores.' 'Score' itself traces back to Old Norse 'skor,' meaning a notch or cut, from the old practice of literally carving marks into a stick or tally to count things, including, infamously, twenty at a time (hence 'fourscore'). So the scorer's job — cutting tallies into the record of who's winning — is etymologically almost exactly what the stick-notcher of a thousand years ago was doing, minus the stick.
- origin
- from score, meaning a notch cut to tally
- power
- can end arguments with a single pen stroke
- irony
- often worse at the activity than the players
- stakes
- one miscount can rewrite history books