(FORTUNE Magazine) – Most golf talk is boring but descriptive (sandie, greenie, worm burner, duck hook), but at least one term is downright confusing: Why exactly are golf courses known as "links"?

Listen to the hackers at your local pro shop, and you're likely to think the term applies to any golf course. Not so, says Rand Jerris, the historian and librarian for the United States Golf Association, who says the term is "widely misapplied." The term "links" is shorthand for a geographic land form found only in Scotland, where the game was invented. Linksland referred to low-lying seaside land, "characteristically sandy, treeless, and undulating." Since the land was poor for farming, Scots found other uses for it--most notably sports, such as archery, bowling, and of course golf. (And to be true links, the land must have all these geographic characteristics and be on an estuary--where the mouth of a river meets the sea.)

That means that any time you've referred to a non-Scottish golf course as "links," you've been in error; no American golf course truly deserves the name. If you tell someone you're hitting the links, you'd better be (a) flying to Scotland, (b) on a chain gang, or (c) eating sausage.

--Grainger David