Play the Game

Even worse, football announcers often use “defense” as a verb, as in “that’s how you defense the play.”

My favorite sportscasterism is the habit of calling an exceptional play “a thing of beauty.” I imagine a dog-eared edition of Keats’s Endymion in the broadcast booth, from which Dan Dierdorf has lifted the famous opening line, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” That moment of self-induced naïveté provides relief from many a discussion of “your Peyton Mannings, your Tom Bradys, your Andrew Lucks.”

Josh Chetwynd’s study underscores the enormous influence that sports have had on our language, but is a much more pleasurable experience than listening to a winded star describe his feelings after a game. That’s not to say that the book is a useful source for writers looking to add a free agent to their roster of idioms. Most terms and phrases in The Field Guide to Sports Metaphors are worn-out clichés, the verbal equivalents of overpriced veterans signed by the Washington Redskins’ owner, Daniel Snyder.

Yet this book is a double pleasure—or because I’m being paid by the sports-related pun, a switch-hitter: Its approximately 150 entries are intriguing historical sketches of both language and sports. The entry for “big leagues,” for example, doesn’t only explain what the phrase means idiomatically; it traces the history of different professional baseball leagues, from the National League, the Players’ League, the American Association, the American League, and (finally in 1961) Major League Baseball; and it illustrates how the phrase was used figuratively a century ago. The explanation of the term “run interference” narrates the progress of how a football technique—which we now call blocking, but which had much more dangerous manifestations in the sport’s earlier days—sneaked into the vernacular. Interestingly, the first known example of using the term “move the goalpost” as a metaphor meant it in a positive sense, to help students improve. And did you know that the phrase “hands down” comes from horse racing? When a jockey has a wide lead, he has no need for the rein or whip, so he can put his hands down.

Readers of this magazine will be interested to know that “grandstanding,” playing to the crowd, applied to desperate politicians as early as 1906. And the term “running mate” originally referred to one horse setting the pace for another, like a “rabbit” in present-day distance races—but with the two horses actually harnessed to each other. Two asses yoked together: makes more sense than ever this year.

Many of the expressions catalogued here are surprisingly old. Although quarterbacks call audibles now more than ever (thanks to your Peyton Mannings, your Tom Bradys, your Andrew Lucks), Chetwynd traces the phrase to the jargon of World War II, when air-raid sirens were called “audible signals,” and he posits that postwar coaches applied it to yelling for attention at the line of scrimmage. Many other expressions are surprisingly new: Chetwynd ascribes “my bad” (meaning “my mistake”) to the basketball player Manute Bol, who first used it in the late 1980s. Its incubation period was remarkably brief, because it was common parlance on my soccer team just a few years later—which also tells you how bad we were. But then, a remarkable trait of sports idioms is how quickly they insinuate themselves into everyday speech, perhaps because of the ubiquity of sports in American life. “Slam-dunk” became a basketball term in 1968; it was a common metaphor by the mid-’70s.

Like any good reference work, Chetwynd’s will be a useful umpire for pedantic prescriptivists looking to correct a friend. That’s important, because sports metaphors are frequently fumbled. Years ago, I heard a colleague encourage people to “step up to the bar”—an unfortunate conflation of “step up to the plate” and “raise the bar” that is more likely to get someone drunk than promoted. After PGA v. Martin, in which the Supreme Court determined that the professional golf organization could not prohibit a handicapped competitor from using a cart between holes, people expressed satisfaction that the Court had “leveled the playing field”—an inapt metaphor for a case about a playing field designed not to be level.

Chetwynd’s accomplishment is not his original research—most of the material here is lifted from other sources, especially the Oxford English Dictionary—but his easy style, engaging storytelling, and charming tone, which moves from high to low culture faster than an Allen Iverson crossover dribble. There are references to second-rate Billy Joel songs, great Scottish poets (James Thomson, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott—whom he unfortunately implies wrote during the 18th century), the theme song to The Jeffersons, and Gerald Graff’s influential composition textbook They Say/I Say. Chetwynd has also structured the book wisely. Instead of a strict alphabetical format, he divides the idioms according to sports, with a final section of fugitive phrases. (The winning sport is baseball, with 37 entries. Horseracing is a distant runner-up with 22.)

And the second-guessing inspired by some entries is half the fun. Chetwynd explains that “saved by the bell” originally referred to the old rule that a boxing referee would stop the count for a knockout once the bell sounded to end the round. Now, because a supine pugilist can no longer be so rescued and “the bell no longer [has] this protective quality,” Chetwynd argues that “you cannot . . . be saved by the bell in a boxing ring.” That’s an overstatement: The bell can still rescue a boxer who is getting pummeled at the end of a round. It’s not as dramatic as the original context, but the basic meaning still applies.

I’d also leave the dugout to dispute Chetwynd’s call for the aforementioned “step up to the plate,” which he defines as “when a person enters the spotlight looking to achieve glory.” The Macmillan Dictionary comes closer to the mark when it defines it as “to take responsibility for doing something, even though it is difficult.” (Chetwynd’s entry is still worth reading for its account of how home plate assumed its current form.) Chetwynd has a separate passage for the idiomatic cousin “step up your game” (“to elevate one’s performance”), which dates back to the 1930s: As inelegant and vague as it is, I had assumed it was a more recent innovation.

Considering the recent vintage of many of these idioms, a second edition of Chetwynd’s Field Guide will likely include a few new entries. One possibility is “spike the football,” which has been used often in the Obama years to describe inappropriately celebrating a political victory. And surely it’s only a matter of time before the phrase “walk-off,” a relatively new term for a hit that drives in a run to end a baseball game, is used to describe anything that ends suddenly and emphatically!

Christopher J. Scalia is a writer in Washington.