A: In its oldest sense, “measly” means “affected with measles.” It’s difficult to fathom how that medical meaning could have led to its more prevalent modern sense of “contemptibly small” or “meager.” Since this latter sense developed well over a hundred years ago and no testimony about it survives, we can only speculate about the logic behind it.

One theorist has suggested that the newer sense developed because “there is something singularly unheroic and even miserable about a child with the measles.” This explanation is appealingly simple, but it’s not readily apparent why measles would be regarded as any more “unheroic” or “miserable” than other childhood illnesses such as chicken pox or scarlet fever.

A more likely theory holds that the sense of “measly” meaning “meager” has nothing to do with human measles, but instead relates to the use of “measly” to describe pigs infested with tapeworms. These animals tend to be malnourished and essentially worthless to the farmer. Hence, people would make a natural connection between “measly” animals and something of little value.

For whatever reason, “measly” has been used metaphorically since at least 1864, when a writer of the time decried “the audacity to offer a measly hundred pounds or so for the discovery of a great crime.”
Q My co-worker claims that the expression “level playing field” must come from football, but I wonder about that. Can you resolve this by giving us the origin of the saying? – W.H., Milton, Mass.
A: The field in the expression “level playing field” doesn’t appear to be connected with any particular sport. In the literal sense, playing fields are simply open fields upon which games are played, and all such fields, whether used for baseball, soccer, football, lacrosse or any other sport, are of course, ideally, level.

The first known use of the term “playing field” in its literal sense is in a 16th-century British reference to the sports grounds at Eton. It was probably in the 1950s in the United States that “playing field” was first used figuratively, as in “the playing fields of international democracy” – apparently without intended reference to any particular sport.

“Level playing field” seems to have originated within the banking industry in the late 1970s as a metaphor for “competitive equality” – again, without any clear reference to a particular sport. (Never mind the fact that a few years ago, the U.S. League of Savings Institutions considered “The Level Playing Field” along with “The Automated Hitting Machine” as possible names for its baseball team.)

Interestingly, it took more than a decade before the metaphor was picked up by the world of sports, to be employed in statements like “for the first time our country will be able to play (basketball) on a level field” – a reference to the admission of professional athletes to Olympic competitions.
This column was prepared by the editors of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. Readers may send questions to Merriam-Webster’s Wordwatch, P.O. Box 281, 47 Federal St., Springfield, MA 01102.