The name is pong!
According to urbandictionary.com, beer pong is defined as a drinking game that involves beer and pingpong paraphernalia. The object of the game is to throw pingpong balls across a table into opponents’ half-filled cups of beer. Sounds like the game too many people on this campus erroneously refer to as beirut.
Beirut is the capital city of Lebanon. To refer to a popular drinking game by the name of a foreign city is a travesty to the great American tradition of tossing pingpong balls into opponents’ cups and laughing as they drink themselves to defeat and an altered state of consciousness.
I hail from Bergen County, New Jersey and had never heard the term beirut until I came to college ($40,000 hard at work in the quest for knowledge). If the game centers on a pingpong ball and numerous cups of beer, what doesn’t make sense about calling it beer pong? If the game involved some Lebanese food and maybe some strange Lebanese cultural dance after a cup was made, then I would approve of beirut; but neither of these conditions is true, therefore making the game beer pong.
Why beirut? Let’s just call it Baghdad, or maybe Tehran. These are both Middle Eastern capital cities; so what makes them less worthy candidates for the title of the popular American drinking game?
Every weekend, in addition to the occasional mid-week party, teenagers aim their pingpong balls at the six (or 10 if you’re in college) red solo cups about seven feet away from them. The cups are filled with beer and are drunk if a ball happens to land in them. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to decipher the logic of the title of beer pong. For those who learn better with mathematical equations: beer + pingpong balls = beer pong.
As the night grows later, and the losers begin to feel the effects of their poor play, the game is referred to by its nickname: “pong.” Even the lightweights at the party recognize the name “pong” and are able to identify what is going on. This is where beer pong proves to the rest of the world why it is the more appropriate title for the game.
So next time you’re at a party, spare the fellow guests the geography lesson and play some pong.
It’s called beirut!
I don’t usually argue about many things pertaining to something as straightforward as drinking, but this debate struck me as one in which common sense can and should be applied.
I regret to inform approximately half the population of Fairfield that it’s not beer pong; the other half is correct: it’s called beirut.
You see it’s quite simple: beer pong is a different game all together – one played with paddles. To call the game in which we play pingpong with a cup of beer in one hand and a paddle in the other the same name as the game in which we throw a pingpong ball at cups is just as confusing as calling BASEketball, basketball.
To find the real meaning you have to trace it back to the origin. Though much room is left for debate and much of the info is hearsay, the game of “beer pong,” with paddles, is believed to be developed at Dartmouth College as early as the 1950s. At Dartmouth it was called “pong” and grew to such popularity that the college made it an intramural sport from the early 70s until 1977.
Other Ivy League newspapers have credited Dartmouth as the spiritual home of beer pong. At Dartmouth they call their game “pong” and the less frequently played game “rut.” However, at Lehigh University in 1983, frat brother Dan Schwartz was credited for being the first to get rid of the paddles and create a pyramid of 10 cups to throw the ball at. This is where the term beirut is believed to have been created. This anger I develop over the ignorance of the beer pong-ers started when I saw the movie “Beerfest” this summer. In the movie, the protagonist plays a game of beer pong in which they use paddles, so I thought to myself if that is beer pong, then the game in which we throw the pingpong ball surely isn’t. For some weird reason it seems the further north you go the more people tend to call it beirut. Maybe it’s because we tend to be more educated, as well.
Whatever you want to call it, invite my friends and me over and we will beat you.
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