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Originally Posted by GenuineRisk
Never mind; too good to be true. From wordorigins.com:
<<Upset
One of the legendary origins of sports terminology is that the term upset, meaning an unexpected defeat of one favored to win, is from a classic 1919 horse race that pitted Man o'War, probably the greatest race horse of all time, against an unlikely opponent named Upset.
During his career, Man o'War lost only one race, the 13 August 1919 Stanford Memorial at Saratoga. Man o'War was heavily favored to win, but lost to a horse named Upset. This, the legend goes, is where the sports term upset comes from. Man o'War would face Upset in five other races, winning every one, but this one loss early in his career would be the one to make lexicographic history.
Most lexicographers and etymologists thought the story too good to be true, but no one could disprove it. Sporting usages of upset prior to 1919 just could not be found. Then in late 2002, researcher George Thompson, using the newly available tools of full-text online searching of the New York Times databases, turned up a string of sporting usages of upset dating back to the mid-19th century. Thompson traced the verb to upset to 1865 and the noun to 1877. There are numerous uses of the term in 19th century sportswriting, proving beyond a doubt that it was well-established by the time Man o'War lost his only race. Upset did not father a term, he was just well named.>>
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Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for the word "Upset" in the sense of an unexpected victory. I don't get that. It's not in the "new words" section either.
Is there a link to Thompson's article? It would be easy to mistake a use of "upset" in the sense of "to overturn" with the one we are talking about. In fact, the OED quotes an 1872 usage, "The light active boxer upsetting two stout gentlemen". But they apparently interpreted that usage to simply mean he knocked them over.
Either way, the "Upset" story is a good one. Either we have the terrific coincidence that the only horse to ever beat Man-O-War was named "Upset", or we have the fact that a horse race resulted in a new word (usage) in English.
--Dunbar