- Hitting a home run
- Strike out
- Three strikes and you're out
- Hit it out of the park
- Way off base
- Curve ball
- Getting to first base (or second or third)
- Squeeze play
You get the idea
Monday, October 8, 2007
Sports and the language
Let's try a little 'crowd sourcing' exercise. The object is to build a database of the contributions of sport to the English language to see just how many there are and how many come from each sport. So as a starter here are a few from baseball which I think may be our eventual winner.
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Baseball's big contribution apart from these is the development of the highly efficient verbalised noun "to homer" or more recently "to curve" a hitter.
Cricket has produced more than its fair share of contributions. People have been on sticky wickets far more off the pitch than on in recent times with the emergence of covered pitches. Did the founders of Google know about the googly? Anyway, its original name, the "bosie" may have been suppressed due to the notoriety of Bosie Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover.
In more modern times, "that was a trifle adjacent" and the "corridor of uncertainty" are particularly fine contributions.
An elegant example of cricket and language becoming mixed up was the way Rockley Wilson, a schoolteacher and Test cricketer responded to the fact that Lord Harris (one of the grandees of cricket between 1870 and 1930)had just spilt tea down his trousers in a crowd. Wilson said of the experience that "he was lucky just to get a touch".
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