SPORTING VERNACULAR No 7 TRANSFER FEE

"I simply felt it was time for a fresh challenge," Alan Shearer said about his decision to move back to Newcastle. You could understand his point - at first when you get a salary rise you think you'll never be able to spend it. But soon it becomes all too easy and you itch to be stretched again, forced to think of offshore investments, new ways to prevent that cash silting up your account. Nothing as vulgar as cash is ever alluded to - it's a fee, a word that implies professional decorum and bills drawn up on letterhead, even if the process itself might look to outsiders like an expensive cattle auction.

As it happens, the link between kine and cash is a very old one. Fee used to mean just that - livestock (from the Old High German fehu, cattle). It was also used to describe moveable property (not land or buildings, that is) or even money - an understandable range of meanings given that this was a time when many shops carried little signs saying, "We Accept Aberdeen Angus". Had Alan Shearer been on the transfer list in AD880 - for broad-sword wielding or churl-slaying, perhaps - his signing-on fee would have arrived on foot, mooing loudly and depositing manure on the driveway.

The Oxford English Dictionary is sniffy about the suggestion that the same word gives rise to the Teutonic feodum, the origin for the more modern sense of "fee" (a payment or benefit given in return for a service), though it is hard to resist the feeling that there must be some kind of connection. But here, too, the history offers some interesting reverberations. In this sense, "fee" originally meant an estate or benefit held on condition of service or loyalty - a feudal arrangement that does not seem a thousand miles from the world of modern football.

It is hard to think of somebody on a salary of close to pounds 2m a year as a vassal, but the spectacle of the Premier League baronies tussling to secure the fealty of a famous champion suggests maybe not all that much has changed.