What are your favorites? Some of mine:
- swinging for the fences
- he outkicked coverage
- a pancake block
- a buzzer-beater
- we have this on the goal line
- the full court press
- the point guard for a project
Favorite Cultural Aphorisms from Sports
You know what I'm talking about: a saying from the world sports which aptly describes a common situation in society at large. It can be a theme or an idea or a situation-specific descriptor. Anything at all.
What are your favorites? Some of mine:
- swinging for the fences
- he outkicked coverage
- a pancake block
- a buzzer-beater
- we have this on the goal line
- the full court press
- the point guard for a project
What are your favorites? Some of mine:
- swinging for the fences
- he outkicked coverage
- a pancake block
- a buzzer-beater
- we have this on the goal line
- the full court press
- the point guard for a project
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Man, so many options have a sexual connotation, so I'm not even going to go there...yet.
ReplyDeleteI personally enjoy when a politician "hit a home run" with a speech or moment, if only because I secretly hope that said politico will do a little run around the imaginary bases right afterward, fist pumping in the air.
When have you heard "outkicked his coverage" in real life? Sure sounds sports-only to me.
I just put together a marketing plan for a product that was way too sophisticated for the product I was trying to lease and pulled in fish too big for our company to handle. I outkicked coverage.
ReplyDeleteI have no problem when someone calls an audible... as long as it's not a stupid idea.
ReplyDeleteRick Reilly had a line about this in his most recent ESPN the Magazine column:
ReplyDelete'Sports has the best words, and every CEO steals them. It's a slam dunk. It's a grand slam. It's a complete whiff. And yet, in 32 years, I have never heard an athlete say, "That was just a total filibuster out there!"'
I just thought of my absolute favorite example of this:
ReplyDeleteIn chess, you keep notation of moves using an abbreviated shorthand (for instance Be5 is Bishop moves to square e5), and after a particularly good move one may write ! or even !! to signifiy its greatness. So I love dropping in the exclamation into a line of text (!) a la chess notation.
abbreviated shorthand was redundant; yes I'm dumb
ReplyDeleteRoyce is dumb (!!)
ReplyDeletedoes that work?
I suppose although if it's a standalone thought you might as well use normal punctuation
ReplyDeleteI like it as an insertion into a line of text that expresses a good thought with an exclamatory without breaking the flow of the sentence. But to each his own.
Wait, so are you arguing that chess is a sport? Scott's right. (!) Royce is dumb.
ReplyDeleteor should that read:
ReplyDeleteWait, so are you arguing that chess is a sport?
Scott's right. (!)
Royce is dumb.
MP writes passionately.
Scott still needs to make the 4th and 5th picks in our fake football draft.
I don't see why you'd make the exclamation a parenthetical if you're concluding the sentence anyway.
ReplyDeleteIf in fact chess is a sport (?!), then yes this is my favorite cultural drop from any sports lingo. That's how you do it - and boom goes the dynamite. By the way, one of the writers who does this best is Jerry Holkins (aka Tycho) of Penny Arcade, who you may remember from his pioneering use of How awesome? So awesome.
And boom goes the dynamite ranks there somewhere, not sure if that's just a cultural aphorism which is loosely associated with sports however
Important update from the Winter Olympics that I forgot to add:
ReplyDelete- he's got the hammer (from curling), to signify the catbird's seat or the position of greatest strategic strength... the hammer can show up in all aspects of life
I like how there was a 4 month span between comments...both provided by Royce.
ReplyDeleteIn his sabermetrics column today, Simmons make use of the term "hammer" twice and uses another sports term that I like in real life applications, VORP (Value Over Replacement Player)
ReplyDeleteI was one of the 2134235925 million Americans who got hooked on curling this past Olympics due to NBC's apparent lovefest with the sport...and fully support the introduction of both "the hammer" and "the button" to socially adopted sports aphorisms.
ReplyDeleteSo you're saying 2 quadrillion Americans got hooked on curling?
ReplyDeleteEven though it's a few years old, is VORP the most recent cultural aphorism? Yes or no, I absolutely LOVE using VORP in real life. Well, really "negative VORP" is probably the best use culturally. It's hard to differentiate between a waiter with a 20 VORP and a 30 VORP. But I sure as hell can tell the difference between a waiter with a 10 VORP and a waiter with a negative VORP...with the replacement player in this instance being the guy outside looking in through the window licking his lips asking for leftovers.
nope - saying 2.134235925 quintillion...
ReplyDeleteum... 2,134,235,925,000,000 is 2.13 quadrillion.
ReplyDeleteyeah - that's what I said...2.134235925 quadrillion...
ReplyDeleteAha! MP, here is an example of "he outkicked coverage" from a recent Wright Thompson piece on Grantland:
ReplyDelete"We went to check on Larry, and we flipped through their wedding album, realizing, some of us for the first time, how stunningly beautiful Dean had been. We joked about Larry outkicking his coverage."
Perfect example! Booya! (PS - how is that for going months between comments... 16 months! record!)