[blml] Amended L27C1/27C2 question

[Robert Geller]

Stefanie Rohan writes:
>A double [1D-(1S)-X] 
>that guarantees four hearts should not, in my opinion, be called a 
>"negative double"

Back in the stone ages the double was a "penalty double," showing a desire 
to defend 1Sx.   When Roth and Stone proposed a new use for the double
in the mid-1950s the name "negative double" came to be applied to this
usagem to differentiate it from the penalty double.   At least in the US 
(by the late 1960s) and in Japan (I don't know when, but sometime before
I moved here in 1984) this double was more or less universally used
to show 4+ cards in hearts, and is universally called a "negative double."

If this device were being named today, when no one uses "penalty doubles"
of 1S, it probably wouldn't be called a negative double, but we're stuck with
the name from the history of the development of this convention.

-Bob

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Robert (Bob) Geller,     Tokyo, Japan        geller at nifty.com