Let’s talk sports slang.
In the past few weeks in sports, we have been inundated with sports-speak or sports slang. First, Tom Brady’s retirement/non-retirement story was often accompanied by references to the quarterback as the GOAT. Not an old goat at age 44, but THE GOAT. Back in the day, a goat was an athlete who failed, lost or messed up at the worst possible time; he lost the game, or at least fans pinned the loss on the player. Today, GOAT means “Greatest Of All Time,” and that term-acronym has been attached to Brady, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods, Martina Navratilova or the Williams sisters, Secretariat and others. Lots of sports arguments and discussions come from whom you consider the GOAT in your preferred sport.
That was followed up by March Madness play and a broadcasted basketball array of slang terms produced by commentators including “downtown,” “beyond the arc,” “off the window” or “off the glass,” “in the paint,” “nothing but net,” ”three-possession game,” “swag” and “stans” (fans in the stands). And the term “owns,” as in “he owns that team,” came up more than once.
Baseball is up and running as well, and in one broadcast alone, I heard such idioms as “dinger,” “tater,” “twin-killing,” “toes the slab,” “on the bump,” “painted the black,” “in his wheelhouse” and an overuse of WAR, which is a serious term in the news, but in baseball is a sabermetric-quantitative analysis that means “Wins Above Replacement.”
A recent hockey broadcast used “hat trick,” “drop the gloves,” “checked him into the boards,” “deked him out,” “light the lamp,” “gino” and even a case of “put the biscuit in the basket,” all in less than one period of action.
And even on the tennis courts and golf courses, TV analysts peppered us recently with such terms as (in tennis) “bagel,” “love,” “drop shot,” “daisy cutter” and “deuce,” and in golf coverage I heard, “bite,” “in the spinach,” “on the carpet,” “drained (sinking a long put, also heard in basketball for sinking a three-point shot),” “flop,” “frog hair,” “lip out,” “lie” and “yank.”
Slang is prevalent in all sports, whether broadcast frequently or not, and everything from soccer to skateboarding, horse racing to auto racing, boxing to bowling, volleyball to spikeball, rodeo to darts, fishing to ultimate Frisbee and virtually any other recreation has its own slang.
Sports slang has crossed over into the business world and into day-to-day conversation. Non-athletes routinely “hit it out of the park” as they succeed on a project. They “cross the goal line” as they finish the job. Company-people often “take one for the team” if they didn’t “punt” the project. Perhaps they “dropped the ball” and “took it on the chin.” If they did, “the next man up” “got the ball rolling,” “kept his eye on the ball” and prepared for a “marathon” despite “the curveball” that management threw at him, which forced him to “call an audible”. At the end of the day, he “came out swinging” and this was no “bush league” operation. It went “down to the wire,” but he “quarterbacked” his team and a successful outcome was a “slam dunk”.
We have seen that sports slang can change over time. New words come in, old words change their meaning and some old standbys are gone.
Some old slang and phrases have disappeared … slang is evolutionary.
Gone are such terms as baseball’s horsehide, gonfalon, hassock, stanza, around the horn, Baltimore chop, Texas Leaguer, fireman, arson squad, battery, Uncle Charlie, bender, heat, high cheese, can of corn, twi-nighter, 6-inning wonder and Punch and Judy hitter.
Basketball had carom, cagers, in the key, tickled the twine, baseball pass, threw up a brick, charity stripe, rejection and faked him into the popcorn machine.
Football had gridiron, hook and ladder, the old dipsy-doodle, statue of liberty, razzle dazzle, lugging the leather, flankerback, wingback, T-formation, second-story worker, and run to daylight.
Hockey had the assault vault, hassle castle, sin bin, bender (unlike baseball’s “bender,” which means curveball, a hockey bender is a player whose ankles bend while they are skating), egg (a 0-0 tie), muffin and Kronwalled.
What slang do you love and hate? If you have one I didn’t get, that’s par for the course. Don’t pull your punches, let me know at mike.blake@mountvernonnews.com.
See you next time.
