Knockout: Wimbledon champions Virginia Wade (1976) and Bjorn Borg (1977) with their respective crockery. Photographs: Tony Duffy/Getty

This week, I thought I'd have to leave the dictionary behind. Partly this was out of frustration; I'd searched in vain for an entry to explain why "cup" means "knockout". The World Cup, we know, is a knockout competition, though the trophy is not cup-shaped. And although, confusingly, the Champions' League is a cup, and the UEFA cup has a league phase, we can draw a general distinction between league competitions (in which everyone plays everyone else, usually twice) and cup competitions (in which teams are eliminated as soon as they lose a game). But neither Collins nor OED mentions this, and thus neither attempts to explain how it comes about.

The leap from a cup as a trophy to a cup as a competition is simple metonymy, but I've drawn a complete blank trying to discover how it comes to refer to a specific type of competition: can anyone help? (I've also heard "cup" used in contrast to "plate", where plate refers to a competition among the teams who were knocked out of the cup in its first round. Intriguingly, the OED cites a reference under "plate" which illustrates this meaning, but again doesn't mention it: "1997 Shetland Times 21 Nov. 40/2 A plate event was also held for the first round losers. The men's doubles winners were Ian Smith and Davy Leslie."

I also thought I'd have to leave the dictionary behind when discussing what seems to me to be a sudden explosion in compound nouns beginning man- or lady-, a reflection prompted by some tennis player's objection to the noble manbag (and of course by the fact that Wimbledon trophies comprise a lady-plate and a man-cup). In the same group we have man-date, a social meeting between two men; man-love, affection or sexual activity between men; and man-boobs, flabby pecs. Similarly blokey expressions using lady- include ladylager, a weak lager, and ladyboy, a transvestite. (I asked a friend if she knew of any more and she suggested there should be a word for households of two men, such as my own. We came up with man-age a deux; I'm sure there are better manwords and ladywords waiting to be invented.)

Of course, I couldn't really leave the dictionary behind. Idly checking what the OED had to say under lady (no ladyboy or ladylager), I discovered that lady comes from an Old English word meaning "bread-kneeder", whereas lord comes from an OE word meaning "bread-keeper"; the idea being that the lady of the house manages the preparation of food, and the lord of the house manages its distribution. All very out of date, of course, and ripe for the creation of some new terms. How about manboss and ladyboss?