How did a vegetable become baseball slang for an argument or fight?
The plant’s history is so old that even its etymology is somewhat obscured. In the English language, the word “rhubarb” didn’t emerge until the mid-1400s. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers tags rhubarb as British and gives the following definition: ‘A vocal dispute or argument; murmurous or muttered general conversation (a word repeated by actors to simulate this in crowd scenes)’. In other words it was a royal battle, as in a donnybrook. Today a rhubarb is synonymous with melees and free for alls, but in Shakespeare’s day when a play called for a crowd scene, the director gathered an assembly of actors and had them noisily mutter something akin to “Rhu-bar-bar, rhu-bar-bar ,rhu-bar-bar, which reverberated through the theatre like the sounds of an angry horde. ” Try it. I’ll bet you sound pretty threatening, especially if you’ve got a couple of friends with you. From this “rhubarb” eventually came to be theatrical slang for “commotion.” Rhubarb meant ‘to make crowd no
