Chapter 1.

1. Value-free science
 Harold Murray was a chess player; in his eyes chess was a game that was superior to all other board games. That is allowed, where is prescribed that a human being should not be biased? On the other hand, I can raise the question if his conviction should be heard in the chapter about draughts in his “History of board-games other than chess” of 1952. Murray reasoned: ‘Draughts has some characteristics in common with chess and draughts borrowed them from chess’. A prejudice presented as science.
In the etymological dictionaries however we find a prejudice presented as science once more: the French name jeu de dames is a new sense of the name dame of the chess queen, they state. The great dictionary of French, the Trésor, went very far. Évelyne Bourion, the compiler of the lemma dame, mentioned Eloy d’Amerval as the oldest source of the game name jeu de dames. Her first reference of the word dame meaning chess queen is from a later year. Nevertheless, she notes dame = chess queen as the etymon of the game name jeu de dames.
An interesting sociological subject, which certainly needs discussion on a site that brings up the relation between chess and draughts. Later I shall come back to this remarkable phenomenon