The Brexit negotiations, Theresa May said early this week, were now “in the endgame”. Presumably this was not intended in homage to the chess world-championship match under way in London, but chess is indeed the term’s origin.
An “endgame” – first recorded as “end game” in 1884 (OED) – arises when there are only a few pieces left on the board, though its exact definition is elusive. (The great world champion Alexander Alekhine wrote: “We cannot define when the middle game ends and the end-game starts.”) Not irrelevantly, Endgame is also the title of a play by Samuel Beckett about apocalypse and futility. The first world-championship game saw Magnus Carlsen pointlessly torment Fabiano Caruana in an endgame that lasted three hours and ended in no win for anybody. A promising metaphor for Brexit.
More accurate still is the pretty endgame motif known as zugzwang, German for “compulsion to move”: it is a situation in which, if the player could pass, she would be fine, but she has to make a move, and every move loses. Perhaps what May was slyly signalling was her recognition that Britain has been in a state of zugzwang since 2016?
