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Goose egg. That’s what one of my sixth grade teachers called a zero, a test score achieved by getting all wrong answers. Nothing gave him greater joy than handing out goose eggs.

 

Zero Mostel, with his sonorous bass voice, played Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof. Samuel Joel Mostel earned his nickname as a child from his classmates for his school marks, which presumably included more than a few goose eggs.

 

There was a time when there was no word for nothingness, believe it or not. Now there are: zilch, nada, naught, nil, zip, and in tennis, love. Since nothing is completely straightforward (or is it?), aught and naught may both mean nothing, although aught originally meant the opposite of nothing, which is something.

 

Zero as a mathematical number is traced back to the Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta, who also introduced the concept of negative numbers. So, if you are less than zero, that’s bad, but it’s not zero. Negative infinity is a lot worse.

 

You might not expect much from a place named zero. Zero, Iowa, for instance, is a ghost town. Zero, Mississippi, however, is still a viable community, although its population peaked in 1900 at fifty.

 

Rather than being a ghost town, Zero is the name of a ghost dog in the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas. Zero sports a tiny jack-o-lantern at the tip of his nose which is an homage to Rudolph in this Christmas/Halloween smash-up movie. Whether or not the song Zero by the group Smashing Pumpkins has anything to do with this is not known.

 

So, there’s zero, and then there is absolute zero. The CD costs $15.98, but will cost zero if you get an Amazon Prime Visa card with, naturally, free shipping.

 

As for the tennis term love, it has been suggested that the origin is from the French word for egg “l’oeuf” which sounds quite a bit like the English word “love” and brings us back to goose egg (l’oeuf d’oie).