I did appreciate that Shade was referring to basketball and baseball in line 130 (see my parenthesis concerning the incongruity of Kinbote's commentary on the line). My interest was with Kinbote's/VN's reasons for referring to other sports. We all know that Kinbote hijacks the poem throughout the commentary and twists it to his own ends - but why precisely is clearly a complex question and will vary from line to line. 

What interests me here is VN's particular purpose here and the extent to which it was shaped by his own experience - hence my musings as to the class related issues.

I am grateful to Anthony Stadlen for his comments. I went through the same thought process but (please forgive the presumption) went a little further. I don't doubt that his schoolboy usage in the 50s was soccer and rugger based. So was mine in the early 60s. But he was a child and I was a child. He was addressed by games masters who were speaking to children. When I read reports in The Times of football matches in The early 60s (always one day late) they were under the byline "by our association football correspondent". It was perhaps wrong of me to say 'slang' - perhaps I should have said that "soccer" was falling out of mainstream spoken use (certainly in the circles I moved in) and was not the preferred written form.

But that's only my opinion. 

By the way, has anyone noticed that in Hardy's "Friends Beyond" we get both "ripples" and "cave" in the same line as to"stillicide" - hence presumably the Rippleson caves?

Barrie Akin

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