Sporting Vernacular 22. CRASH, PRANG

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER'S British Grand Prix came to a premature end yesterday when he crashed on the first lap.

The word is almost certainly onomatopeoic, first appearing in the Middle Ages (the OED cites Baret from 1580: "The noise of a thing that is broken"), probably from such Scandinavian words as the Icelandic krassa, though there is a German word krach.

"Prang" was RAF slang (etymology unknown), originally with wider applications - it also meant to bomb from the air, as well as to fall from it, and also to stand someone up. After the war it was applied to cars: the Sunday Times referred in 1959 to "the grisly enormities of American stock car racing, with an hysterical ghoul of a commentator who revelled in every prang."