Sports Language (79)
Published by Dave October 29th, 2006 in podcast, howard s.Howard Shepherd and Dave Shepherd get their game faces on as they talk about the language of sports.
The vocabulary of sport: rule-based terms and slang terms (1:58)
Music bumper from “Natural Man,” by Lil’ Ed and the Blues Imperials (21:36)
How sports language functions (22:03)
Song: “Sitting Around Keeping Score,” by Spymob (26:11)
Rude word of the week: “palooka” (29:35)
Music bumper from “Road to Rhodes” by Scott Helm (32:36)
Sports metaphors in everyday speech (33:16)
Music courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network and IODA Promonet
Theme music by Kick the Cat
time: 41:16
size: 37.8 Mb
rating: PG-13 (We discuss the sexual meaning of some metaphors from baseball.)
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Download “Sitting Around Keeping Score” (MP3, 192kbps)
Hey Guys,
Just listening to the “Sports Language” show and wanted to point something out.
I come from Australia where both Rugby League and Rugby Union are popular and wanted to say that the term “Touchdown” is never used in either. It’s called a “Try” in both forms of the game. And the score line is called the “Try Line” (or maybe “tryline”, I’m not sure).
I’ve always thought it weird that we have to actually touch the ball to the ground and it’s called a “Try”, whereas you guys just cross the line for a “Touchdown”.
Sorry to be so picky. Other than that, interesting as always
Wow, I just discovered this website. This is very cool! Thank you!
Of course, I immediately started with the first podcast in sight. I’m currently studying English, my mother tongue being Dutch, spoken in Holland.
On your remarks about free kicks and penalties in soccer/football: a free kick comes after a foul, but it’s not exactly a penalty. A free kick is exactly what the word says: the player gets to kick the ball wherever he wants, without direct obstruction from an opponent.
When the ref signs for a penalty, that’s a whole other story. A penalty is a special kind of free kick. You only ‘receive’ it when your opponent has made a foul inside the rectangular space in front of his own goal. Usually these fouls are quite dirty, (tackles on the player, for example) since the defenders have to prevent you from scoring.
A penalty is a free kick from a special spot (marked with a dot) right in front of the goal. Now it’s you and the goalkeeper: no one else is allowed to enter the rectangle when you kick the penalty. A penalty almost always involves the handing out of a yellow (or red) card to the one who made the foul.
A free kick, whether direct or indirect, allows for any opponent to stand inbetween you and the goal, as long as he is at least nine (or eleven, I’m not sure) meters away.
As you can see, I could do with some more info on sports terms… But I hope you understand.
Pete, thanks for the correction on the rugby term. Now that you mention it, I did know that the act of scoring is called a “try” in rugby. It is indeed strange that you don’t have to touch the ball down on a touchdown, but you do on a try. (And I always liked the modest sound of the word “try” as the name for a score in rugby.)
Els, thanks for the clarification on the football (soccer) free kick. I’m pretty sure that spot in front of the goal to which you refer is eleven meters out from the goal. I remember this because of the title of a story by Peter Handke: “Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter” (English: The Goalie’s Fear of the Eleven-Meter Kick). A strange and rather disturbing story whose title has stuck with me for 20 years or so.
Hi, I listen regularly, and think your show is great! I enjoyed your discussion about the Hail Mary pass in this recent podcast and wanted to alert you to a song which highlights the point you were making about Touchdown Jesus. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5mqN0A42I has a fan-video made to match the song by Heywood Banks. Enjoy.
Hi!
Thanks for another fun show. As a sports coach I found your analysis of sports language very interesting, but I thought I would add my own sports experience. In downhill ski racing the sticks one turns arounds are called “gates” because one must go through a set of two on either side of themselves in order to complete a turn and thus we “enter a gate”. We also have in slalom combonations where many quick successive verticle (being verticle with the hill) is called a “flush”. The skier, like water in a river, must quickly dodge around the gates. There are many other distinctive terms in this sport but one thing I never really understood is the term “hairpin”. This is commonly found in any racing sport with a set track that is not straight. Do you have any idea where this term came from?
Thanks and keep up the great work! I rooting for you (another phrase I don’t understand)!
Cheers,
Shelley
Point of order, Word Nerds!! I’m just coming out of baseball mode, licking my wounds because my Detroit Tigers performed embarrassingly at the Series. And because of this heightened awareness, I was surprised to hear you say a batter has to run 60 feet to the base, then another 60 feet to the next base. The thing is, if he does that, he’s going to miss the other 30 feet necessary to reach the base! I’m sure you know the distance between each base is 90 feet and the pitcher’s mound is 60 feet 6 inches from home plate. If listeners are learning the rules of baseball from your podcast, they may be surprised when they run 60 feet and are only 2/3 of the way to being safe!
Thanks for an always interesting podcast. Wish you were producing it more often!
Boy, is my face red! Thank you, Jason for that correction. I don’t think I was remembering a softball field or youth baseball dimensions or something. I just got my 6’s and 9’s transposed in my head!
On the Word Nerds Forum there is a thread about the last books people have re-read. There I mentioned David Nemec’s wonderful book The Official Rules of Baseball, Illustrated. This book explains the development of many of baseball’s rules through historical anecdotes. While the distance from the pitcher’s rubber to home plate has changed over the years, the one thing that has remained constant since the beginnings of the game in about 1839 is the distance between the bases: 90 feet.
Next time I’ll run at least 90 feet before I consider myself safe!
Sorry about the Tigers, Jason. I really thought they were going to take the whole thing! (Until the World Series itself, that is.)
Thought you might like some cricket-related idioms, all in (fairly) common use in the UK:
On a sticky wicket: in trouble
Hit someone for six: amaze/shock someone
Bowl someone a googly: challenge someone / make life difficult for them (this is hard to translate!)
Out for a duck: utterly losing, achieving nothing.
There are probably loads more which don’t spring to mind at the moment.
Cricket language is especially prevalent in politics. Mrs Thatcher’s downfall in 1990 came after she was bowled a googly by a cabinet minister, Geoffrey Howe, in the House of Commons. Howe shocked the commons with a fine cricketing metaphor about her leadership style:
“It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain”
Jonathan, could you explain what (in the game of cricket) it means to “bowl a googly”? I wonder whether it might be similar to the American idiom “to throw someone a curveball,” which is to present an opponent or interlocutor with an unexpected twist or argument so as to knock him off balance.
Did I get it right when I inferred that a “sticky wicket” literally refers to a muddy cricket pitch? Or might a wicket be sticky from the bowler’s point of view; i.e., referring to the difficulty of knocking the bails off the stumps?
A googly is (i think) a ball which looks like it’s going to bounce away from the batsman but, because of the spin on it, bounces back towards him. Therefore very difficult to handle.
Re: sticky wicket. The very idea of playing cricket in mud would make any Englishman shudder! A sticky wicket is merely slightly damp ground in front of the batsman - apparently this makes the ball behave in a very unpredictable way. A good bowler can exploit this to make a batsman’s life a misery.
Thanks Word Nerds for a fascinating show!
Jonathan’s description of a googly is about right. Normally, a very good batsman can detect from the way the ball (bowled by a slow bowler, a ’spinner’) is spinning in the air what direction (and at what angle) it will bounce when it hits the ground in front of him and will adjust his stroke/shot with the bat to compensate. However, a googly appears to leave the bowler’s hand in the same way as normal (as his/her ’stock’ ball) and appears to be spinning in the usual direction, when in fact it’s cleverly disguised and will bounce in the opposite direction to what would be expected. Not many bowlers can bowl a good well-disguised googly, and then they don’t bowl it often, to exploit its surprise value. Jonathan might be worried about googlies that the world-record-holding spinner Shane Warne might use here in Australia in the coming huge series against the visiting England team.
In Australia we call a googly a wrong’un.
It seems to me that cricket’s long history has provided the English language with heaps of expressions that are used in other contexts, but I don’t know whether they are common in US English too. Like Jonathan says, they often crop up in politics. Some examples that come to my mind:
“to play a straight bat” = to be cautious, not take any risks, or to give an evasive answer to a question (the batsman in cricket plays a straight bat in order to defend his wicket carefully, by not playing across the flight of the ball).
“to let it go through to the keeper” = to not answer a question (an Opposition leader said recently: “I’ll let that go through to the keeper”. When the batsman knows that the ball will not hit his wicket, he may choose to bide his time and not strike the ball, whereupon it just passes through to be gathered in by the ‘wicket-keeper’ [like the catcher in baseball?])
“to go through to the keeper” = someone might say “That went through to the keeper” when he/she can tell that his/her conversation partner didn’t understand what he just heard.
“to bat for the other side” = to be homosexual
“to pull up stumps” = to finish whatever you are doing (the end of a day’s play in cricket can be signified by the umpire pulling the three stumps (that make up the ‘wicket’) out of the ground)
“to have had a good innings” = to be a person of an advanced age (a cricket batsman’s involvement out in the middle of the ground, until he is ‘out’/dismissed by the opposing team, is called an innings). It can also refer to the length of someone’s career rather than age.
“to be X years not-out” = often said colloquially in Australia of someone who is of notably old age but who is still coping well [”She’s 87 not-out and goes for a walk every day”] (Until a batsman is ‘out’/dismissed by the other team, i.e. while his innings is not yet over, his score is given as a number ‘not-out’ - also there is always one ‘not-out’ batsman at the end of a team’s innings)
“to be a safe pair of hands” = to be experienced, reliable. (An Australian politician promoted himself as being a good choice for new Opposition Leader because he was a ’safe pair of hands’. In cricket this refers to a fielder who is a very reliable catcher of the ball.)
Cricket expressions even invade commentary on other sports. In an Australian Rules Football game, if a player ineptly lets the ball come towards him along the ground and pass between his legs instead of picking it up, the commentators often say “he’s been clean bowled” (a batsman is ‘clean bowled’ if the bowler gets him out by bowling a ball that hits his wicket without touching anything (eg the edge of his bat or his clothing) on the way through).
The Australian Prime Minister Mr Howard is a big fan of cricket and he once said this in a live interview with a radio journalist:
“JOHN HOWARD: And I intend, on this issue, to play a straight bat as far as keeping the Opposition informed. I mean I will bowl plenty of bumpers on other things, but I’m, I’m going to play a straight bat on this.
MARK WILLACY: And the Coalition hopes that strategy will see John Howard remain not-out when the election campaign is over.”
(A ‘bumper’ is a ball bowled so that it bounces fast and dangerously at the batsman’s head.)
Hey guys,
I know this has nothing to do with this show but before I went to Norway, I downloaded all your shows so as to keep me entertained and in your show I think about idioms, you mentioned the word doggie bag and apparently you didn´t know where it came from. I came across some ideas in comments and thought I could share mine: Well, here in Czech Republic, and I´m sure in the US too, there is the stereotype of dogs eating bones or whatever, well, and there are meals in the restaurants that leave bones afterwards. In fact, in some lower class pubs where you could be allowed with your dog, you would throw him the bones directly, but back to the topic. Nowadays, I think only old people do it, but when there are some leftovers such as bones or fat, they ask for the doggie bag for their dogs. I think the idea behind is that the dog, many times their only remaining companion, shares at least a bit of the good time they had in the restaurant, and it should partly compensate the dog for being left home alone. Well, hope this helped, cheers and keep up the good work
Another couple of cricket expressions in everyday lingo (or at least I assume they’re from cricket!):
“to be on the front foot”/ “to be on the back foot” = to be confident, take the initiative, be attacking / to be on the defensive. (The batsman in cricket stands side-on to the bowler while waiting for the bowler to bowl the ball. His foot that’s closer to the bowler is the ‘front’ foot; the foot closer to the wicket behind him that he’s defending is the ‘back’ foot. If the batsman takes a step [with his ‘front’ foot] out towards the ball that’s flying down the pitch towards him, it’s generally seen as attacking play. To take a step in the opposite direction is often part of a defensive shot. E.g. “They found out that she had not yet listened to the latest Word Nerds podcast and she was on the back foot for the rest of the conversation.”)
Yeah a great show guys.
Lots of great info here about sporting expressions.
Just to add a little bit more info on the term ‘try’ in Rugby and Rugby League.As I understand it the term stems from the original opportunity to
“try for a goal” - When a try is scored the scoring team get an opportunity to kick the ball over the crossbar of the goal posts for extra points.
When Wlliam Webb Ellis first picked up a soccer ball/football and ran with it - the idea was still to score a goal between the posts. This was slowly adapted to placing the ball over the line to allow you to ‘try for a goal’ and now the placing of the ball has been shortened into a ‘try’.
And of course the ‘goal’ that they can try for has now been changed to a ‘conversion’ - which allows the ‘try’ scoring team to convert the try from 5 points (4 points in Rugby league) to 7 points (6 points).
There are however still other goals that can be scored - a penalty goal (Ball is placed on a tee and kicked between the posts after a foul) and a dropped goal (ball is dropped (similar to a punt)and allowed to bounce slightly on the ground before being kicked over the crossbar) and is used during general play.
Pete and Dave, In rugby you have to touch the ball down in “the in-goal”, this is the zone to score tries. Best regards for you from Tucuman - Argentina.
Thanks, Sebastian. I think the “in-goal” must be the equivalent of the “end zone” in American football.
If the defensive team can get the offensive team to touch the ground in their OWN end zone (i.e., the zone at their backs, rather than the goal which they are striving to reach), then the defense scores a “safety” worth two points. In that case, the ball, or the knee of the ball carrier, must touch the ground.
However, on a touchdown, there is no such requirement. The foot of the ball carrier is the only thing that has to cross the goal line and touch somewhere in the other team’s end zone–not the ball or the knees.
Although I’m not a cricket fan at all, it’s a testament to the popularity of the came in Australia that not only do I know all of the cricket terms proferred, I actually know another one.
A “hat-trick” in cricket refers to a bowler dismissing three batsmen in consecutive deliveries. Although the term is now widely used in other sports and in the general vernacular to denote events occuring in threes, it was first coined in the 1800s in relation to cricket.
A hat-trick is a very rare occurrence. I belive that in test cricket history there have only been 30 or 40 of them since that first hat-trick in the 1800s (there’s been a few of them in the one dayers as well).
And the reason I know so much about them is that when he was about 15, my brother actually bowled a hat trick. For his efforts he got a trophy that featured the lucky ball. Naturally I couldn’t understand the fuss and so it was explained to me in painful detail by my cricket-mad parents just what a hat-trick was and why my brother was so remarkable.
God I hate cricket!! But I love language.
Where do I click to view this podcast?
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(Yet) another cricket expression:
“Take your bat home” = to resign; to give up; to stop cooperating.
example “If these [rebellions] persist to the extent that it makes Government difficult don’t be surprised to see Blair take his bat home in frustration and let someone else have a go at leading the party and the country.”
I wonder if this is used in the Baseball-sphere in the same way?
i am actually getting ready to be a master of ceremony for my schools bi-ennial inter-house sports competition,can you please tutor me in some terms relevant to sport commentry.
we will have track and field events,games and fun!
i’ll impatiently expect your reply
Funmi
Sorry, Funmi, that’s a pretty general request. Do you want English terms that have to do with track and field? Are there terms you have heard that you don’t understand?
Maybe somebody well versed in track and field can respond to this.