Sport - an activity involving physical exertion or skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment - Concise Oxford English Dictionary, eleventh edition, 2006.
So snooker's not sport, then? Sitting down for long periods, occasionally getting up to walk around a 6'x12' table, bending over to play a few shots, then sitting down again. No serious physical exertion there.
And whether snooker involves physical skill is the same argument that raises its head once a year about darts. Does working a series of balls (diameter two-and-one-sixteenth inches) around said table require physical skill, in the same way that working a cricket ball or a football around a field requires it?
Actually, I think it does, but it's not the physical requirements I'm discussing here, but the mental.
Having visited the World Snooker Championships in Sheffield at the weekend, I'm of the opinion that very few sports exert such tremendous mental pressure on the participants.
Mrs W and I (snooker is the one sport my wife will willingly watch) were present at the Crucible Theatre for the final session of John Higgins' semi-final against Steven Maguire.
Maguire had opened up a 14-10 lead by the end of Friday evening's session in the best-of-33 frame match. This meant that, if he played as well on Saturday afternoon, we could be trekking all the way from Tamworth to Sheffield on trains plagued by drunken football fans to watch three frames of snooker.
The thought lay in my brain like the aftermath of a full English breakfast all through Saturday morning. When we took our seats at the Crucible and found ourselves sitting next to six burly men in Sunderland FC shirts, the portents did not look good.
When Maguire got on the scoreboard first in frame 25, with Higgins looking tentative and uncertain, I was mentally working out which real ale pubs we could visit if we were faced with a spare three hours before our train home.
But then, a funny thing happened on the way to the Kelham Island Tavern. Maguire began missing easy pots - and kept missing them. That 14-10 lead became 14-11....then 14-12 (Higgins, 100-plus break )...then 14-13.
Maguire took the next to make it 15-13 but after the mid-session interval, it was clear that things had changed. All of a sudden, the 980-strong audience, in a theatre which is nowhere near as big as it looks on television, could almost sense Maguire becoming smaller.
He sank lower in his seat, he looked anxious at the table, he banged his cue on the floor when he missed another straightforward pot.
Meanwhile Higgins, not the biggest of men, seemed to grow in stature. He bustled around the table, compiled his second century break of the afternoon in frame 29 and suddenly, the pressure was on his rival.
It looked as if Maguire had conquered it when he got a flying start in the next but then came a moment that could haunt the rest of his career.
He was faced with a straightforward pink into the middle pocket that would have put him 50 points clear. With the TV cameraman, the Warrillows and 978 other people looking over his shoulder, he forced it a couple of inches wide.
Higgins cleaned up, Maguire seemed to disappear through a crack in the floorboards and was never seen again as Higgins won the last three frames and the match.
The 2.3 million people who stopped up past midnight on Monday to watch Higgins play Mark Selby in the final will tell you what happened next.
This, in my view, was sporting pressure unlike any other. Sporting pressure is supposed to be missing a penalty in front of 60,000 noisy people in a football/rugby ground; missing a four-foot putt in front of thousands around the 18th green as some idiot screams "Geddinnnaaaahole!!!!"; hitting the winning runs/taking the final wicket before 20,000 people at Lord's.
But this was somehow different. Throughout the whole of the afternoon, there was almost no cheering. It was almost impossible to tell whose side the crowd were on. The only emotion was the imperceptible sound of the air coming out of Maguire's tyres - and of Higgins' confidence visibly inflating.
Yet you could cut the tension with a knife and the silence seemed to make it even sharper. The penalty-taker, the golfer, the batsman/bowler has to learn to shut out the crowd noise. The snooker player, on the other hand, must learn to deal with the silence and the crowd looking over his shoulder.
By the end of the three-and-a-half hour session, I felt as wrung out as if I'd spent 90 minutes at the Lamb, bawling at a referee. And all I'd done was sit in silence and watch two men push a ball around a table.
Yet it might prove to be one of the most intense and enjoyable sporting experiences of my year. I can't wait the first weekend in May of 2008.