Nomenclature - What's in a Name
Stand up paddleboarding, stand up paddling, stand up paddlesurfing, stand up paddle board surfing, stand up boarding, stand up paddle surf, stand up surfing, paddleboarding, 'Beach Boy' surfing, SUP`ing, SUP`ers...It's hard to understand how a sport can successfully market and promote itself, when the collective masses, cannot agree upon a name, very probably because they are uncomfortable with it in the first place. So fast has been the sports expansion, the tribal elders involved seem to have overlooked giving true consideration to an appropriate name to this run-away hybrid sport and so we have a somewhat undignified clumsy nomenclature, more fitting of a description than an intelligible, neat, tidy, universally understood construct.
Stand up paddleboarding, took its name from an already existing ocean sport - paddleboarding founded in the mid to late 1920s with the evolution of the paddleboard devised by Tom Blake. Prior to this, the sport was simply called surfboard paddling utilizing massive surfboards of the time.
By simply adding a verb intransitive, we end up with a clumsy variant. Confusingly, ‘Stand Up’ implies one is in the process of ‘Standing Up’ and once ‘Stood Up’ one is said to be ‘Standing’. If at the time of naming, some thought was applied, the idea of canoeing on a board (regardless of whether standing or not) would have simply translated into canoeboarding. Consider the following water orientated 'Boardsports' which for the most part are neat and tidy nomenclatures by any other comparison:
Surfing, Windsurfing, Sailboarding, Boardsailing, Wakeboarding, Skurfing,
Kneeboarding, Bodyboarding, Paddleboarding, Kiteboarding, Skimboarding, Riverboarding,
Flowboarding . . . all flow off the tongue, yet Stand Up Paddleboarding is a tortured mouthful.
That paddleboarding is a pre-existing, established, highly regarded ocean sport, deserves respect in not being confused as one and the same. The sport requires the use of the hands and the mandatory absence of a paddle, but handboarding probably didn't sound particularly appealing, so who could blame its inventors for choosing the latter.
Stand-up paddleboarding does however require the use of a paddle, a canoe paddle by any other description, an outrigger canoe paddle in the first instance to be precise, and of course the use of a board, hence the notion of canoeboarding or to add a touch of neo-melanesian and a hint of the Pacific as one might add an olive to a Martini, kanuboarding. The resulting nomenclature seems to aptly address the current clumsiness in addition to the fact that paddleboarding is already taken, regardless of whether one is paddling with the hands, prone, kneeling or standing.
Rebecca Seal of the UKs, 'The Observer' writes as if to confirm as a first impression the synergy with paddlesports, 'The board itself is more reminiscent of a kayak than a surfboard - it's much wider, hollow and very light, and so sits slightly out of the water.' To quote Lloyd Hook of one of the UKs most prominent, well respected tabloid newspapers The Sunday Telegraph, 'Now more than two centuries later, the Tahitian techique has landed on these shores. It has undergone further refinements on the way of course - wetsuits, carbon fibre paddles, a cumbersome name and now comes to us in the guise of a new sport known as stand-up paddleboarding (or SUP to those who really want to master the lingo.
'
While some may see this as unimportant, even the sports origins are being confused and tortured in the hands of journalist and newcomers who have tried the sport and then either been misinformed or simply invented something appropriately steeped in romanticism and nonsense to spice up a good read, though the observation made of the name, is of course,
spot on.
To Clarify
1. Paddleboarding is already a 'stand-alone' sport
2. Paddleboarding is performed without a paddle.
3. Paddleboarding is uniquely different to stand-up paddleboarding
4. Paddleboards are uniquely different to stand-up paddleboards
5. Stand-up paddleboarding is a clumsy, cumbersome, conflicted name.
6. Stand up paddleboards, it is argued, are not oversized surfboards
7. Stand up paddling requires the use of an extended canoe paddle
8. Performing canoe strokes on a board is a derivation of canoeing
9. Stand up paddleboarding is first and foremost a paddle sport.
In short, performing a canoe paddling stroke, using a single bladed extended canoe paddle whilst standing on a board, considered by designers themselves, as neither a surfboard or a paddleboard, is by any other logical definition a board upon which the act of canoeing is being performed.