How the Term "Squirt" Began
Robert Byrne

When I was writing Byrne's Standard Book of Pool and Billiards in 1977, only a scattering of top players and analytical players were aware of or thought about the way the cueball path diverges slightly away from the cue line when sidespin is used. At the time, the word used for the phenomenon was deflection. I don't think the phenemenon or the word had ever been mentioned anywhere in billiard publications. When a player named Jack Leavitt told me that he called the phenomenon "squirt," I embraced it and used it in the book on page 264, naming Levitt as the coiner in the early editions. (The first edition came out in the fall of 1978.) I liked the word because of its punchy sound and because I resisted using the word deflection; as a civil engineer I knew that deflection had been used for a hundred years at least to mean "bending." When a structural member bends under stress, the bend is measured as "deflection." I didn't want to blur the meaning of a useful technical term by applying it to a cueball path.

Ron Shepard in a recent post says that Bob Meucci claims to have coined the word deflection to mean squirt "about twenty years ago," but, as you can see, the word deflection came first. Shepard also paraphrases Meucci as being opposed to using the word deflection to mean the bending of the cue, which is odd, because that is in fact the technical and well-established meaning of the word. As far as what causes squirt, it may well be that Mr. Meucci's high-speed films prove his points, in which case I will stand corrected.

R. Byrne

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