Is sloppy the new moist?

From an AP story about Sean Avery's NHL suspension

“I’m really happy to be back in Calgary; I love Canada,” he said. “I just want to comment on how it’s become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my (former girlfriends). I don’t know what that’s about, but enjoy the game tonight.” He then walked out.

Legend: (former girlfriends) = sloppy seconds

What's wrong with the line? Too picturesque? Too evocative? Or is it the dismissiveness of referring to a person in such an objectifying manner?

When I first heard Avery make the comment about sloppy seconds I thought he was talking about all the goals that other players make from picking up rebounds of his shots on goal. Seriously.

Dormie: considering the links

My favourite golf term: dormie (also dormy).

In match play the score is kept by counting the number of holes each competitor wins. The total number of strokes doesn't matter.

When a player is leading by the same number of holes left in play, that player is dormie, or dormie-X (where X is the number of holes left to play). The trailing player then has to win every remaining hole just to halve the match (you don't tie; you halve). The player who is dormie will win the match by winning or halving any of the remaining holes.

A player who is dormie is in a position to likely win the match outright and is guaranteed at least a half.

Two very different theories on its origin:
The Wikipedia page takes an ambitious stance, connecting it to the plural of dormouse, a little rodent found in Scotland. It further connects the word to golf competition by claiming that the reclusiveness of the little beasts made any sighting on the links a good omen.

The USGA settles on a derivation from dormir meaning 'to sleep' since the leading player can rest easy as it is now impossible to lose. I must admit this is the derivation I always assumed. The connection to being dormant, just waiting emerge, makes intuitive sense.

Funk & Wagnalls 1960 takes it back to dialectal English dorm meaning doze -- and further back to Latin dormire.

Webster's New Twentieth Century 2nd ed simply calls it Scottish in origin.

But it's hard to attest. And few dictionaries have much confidence in any derivation.

The OED doesn't offer an etymology.
The American Heritage Dictionary claims unknown origins.
Webster's New World Third Edition puts only a question mark in the brackets.
Merriam-Webster also throws up its hands.
The Historical Dictionary of Golfing Terms agrees that it's Scottish but offers no further derivation.

John Ayto doesn't offer an entry in his Dictionary of Word Origins but he does wonder if hibernating dormouse gets its name from connection to French dormeuse: sleeper (fem). Similar etymologies of dormouse are possible and they get some nods from dictionaries as a possibilities. Something that muddies the lucky dormouse connection mentioned above as well as the arguments against it.

...so the US team won the Ryder Cup. Is it just me or do chants of USA! USA! really make little sense in sporting events?

Say my name! Say my name!

John Wells writes on his phonetic blog: It’s Wimbledon fortnight, and our television screens are full of tennis.

Mine are too. Tennis comes second after hockey among my favourite professional sports to watch. Perhaps it's the names. Both sports offer some gorgeous spellings and pronunciations. So Wells provides helpful advice on some pronunciations that are often slaughtered:

English people seem to have a complete blind spot about the letter c having the value ts in eastern European languages.

Remember: When Polish is Anglicized orthographically, a <c> is pronounced ts.

But: In Turkish the <c> is a voiced postalveolar affricate ʤ: the consonant in 'edge' and twice in 'judge'.

He adds:

Ljubičić gets his medial tʃ in English, too, although Ivanišević, like the late Milošević, usually misses out on his ʃ.

What's a fellow to do? Especially when all your efforts to correct a pronunciation fall prey to a clumsy tongue.



Not only does the chair umpire miss the ʃ; he pronounces it as n. He gets closest at the end but instead of the more common depalatalisation to s it sounds to me like he added voiced: z.

Goran was always fun to watch. I remember when he won as a wild card at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in 2001. I almost cried. I can turn into a baby watching this sport.

The matchup linguistics has been waiting for

A Facebook group that promises to make linguists look even dorkier. And that's a good thing.

[Update: Dammit! I should have titled this post "Penultimate Fighting Championship!"]




My money's on the Philadelphia kid. Boston Pops hasn't been the same since Ali G. "Norman" -- Hilarious.

He puts the Y in XYZ

Ultimate fighter Jens Pulver is in the crowd watching game 3 of the Detroit-Dallas series. A few minutes ago one roving reporter scurried over for a few questions. When sending it back to the guys up in the box the reporter offered the following commentary on Pulver's near aptronym:

He puts the pulver in pulverize.

How does that work? He puts the 'powder' in 'to make into powder'? Isn't the X of he puts the X supposed to be a word that carries a relevant and otherwise unconsidered meaning? Like she puts the fun in fundamentals or he puts the pain in painting or she puts the love in clover? (Not that I understand what those last two would mean.)

It actually works, if redundantly, because pulver is an obsolete verb meaning to make into powder: pulverize. So using current terminology he puts the pulverize in pulverize.

But I doubt that our speaker was thinking of that meaning. It seems more likely to me that he was thinking of a phrase like you can't spell pulverize without Pulver. See -- there the kid's name doesn't have to have a meaning but it still makes sense when using it to call attention to a near aptronym.

There's no "I" in [tim]

The one professional team I root for is playing the professional team I root against. My Detroit Red Wings are playing those Colorado Avelanches. Avelanchers?

See that's a problem with non-plural team nicknames. What do we call the individuals on the team? But maybe that's a good thing. It encourages a group mentality. As Mr Sapir-Whorf proved a long time ago it's impossible to be selfish on a team that doesn't allow you to refer to yourself as a single player.

And when you say that you're playing against an avalanche you're forced to imagine that you're playing against a force that you do not have the power to stop. The best you can hope for is that you will survive by outrunning it. Language forces these thoughts on us.

Which leagues and which teams have caught on to this bit of linguistic legerdemain?

NHL 3/30
The Colorado Avalanche the Minnesota Wild and the Tampa Bay Lightning. Get this -- the Lightning have only won Lord Stanley of Preston's Cup once. Scientists say the team will have to move to another city in order to win it a second time.

NBA 3/30
Here we find 3 More. The Miami Heat the Orlando Magic and the Utah Jazz. Again 10%.

NFL 0/32
They're not playing along. Not a single team uses a singular or mass noun as a nickname.

CFL 0/8
The Canadian Football League doesn't have any singular or mass nouns among their current 8 teams. But they've had a singular name before: the Las Vegas Posse in 1994.

The USFL had 2 out of 19: the Chicago Blitz and the Los Angeles Express.

Arena 9/17
Arena Football is crawling with non-plurals: the Chicago Rush the Colorado Crush the Georgia Force the Grand Rapids Rampage the Kansas City Brigade the New Orleans VooDoo the Philadelphia Soul the Tampa Bay Storm and the Utah Blaze. Eight singular and one mass: 9 out of 17.

MLB 0/30
And in baseball only the Soxes come close to squeaking by as singular/mass nicknames. But the OED tells us that we have to consider sox an altered form of the plural of sock. Damn dictionaries controlling our use of the language!

MLS 9/14
In this US version of a soccer league the naming gets confusing. You have a team like Chivas USA that goes by a plural count noun that few will recognize in English. But they can also be called the goats or a few other nicknames. D.C. United follows the lead of several European teams that claim simply the unity of a region. Then you have teams from Toronto and Dallas that simply call themselves Football Clubs. There's the Chicago Fire and the New England Revolution. You've got the Columbus Crew (they named themselves with a thesaurus: Hey what's another word for team?) the Houston Dynamo the LA Galaxy, and Real Salt Lake. Or is that the Real Salt Lake? These MLS teams like using count nouns in the singular. That's risky. It lends itself to one player's arrogance getting out of hand. It'll all be over for them when that egomaniac starts proclaiming I am the Dynamo! or I am the Galaxy! Only one player will be able to do so.

WNBA 9/14
Out of the 14 teams in the WNBA 9 of them are singular or mass nicknames: the Atlanta Dream the Chicago Sky the Connecticut Sun the Detroit Shock the Indiana Fever the New York Liberty the Minnesota Lynx the Phoenix Mercury and the Seattle Storm. The Phoenix Mercurys wouldn't do it as a name. It sounds like a garage full of not very sporty cars.

NCAA
And doing a quick run through NCAA teams we find the North Carolina State Wolfpack the Marshall Thundering Herd the Tulane Green Wave the Tulsa Golden Hurricane the Stanford Cardinal the Alabama Crimson Tide the North Texas Mean Green and the Nevada Wolf Pack. The herd and the wolf packs are collective nouns so the players can call themselves wolves or buffalo(es).

Where is all this heading?

Well I'm looking forward to following this second round of the playoffs because even tho an avalanche is often overwhelming I like my Red Wings' chances of playing well against six flakes at a time.


[correction: in the original piece I reported that 3 out of 30 is 30% when in fact 3 out of 30 is not 30%]

Safer than lawn darts

Quick question.

What do you call the game played by throwing little bags at a board like the one pictured here?

I've heard the following:

bean bags
bunghole
cornhole
tailgate toss

One friend responded saying I'm going to say bag-in-the-hole because it's filthy.

Not all answers need be so judgmental. And if you're able to supply any regional information that'd be great too. A friend introduced me to the game in North Dakota where all I heard was bean bags.

Are there prescriptivists in sports?

The Ridger recently shared a link to Mitch Albom's column about Michigan's new coach. I started a quick response in the comments section but I kept writing so I figured I'd turn it into a post. Nothing linguisticky here.

In the piece Albom addresses his concerns with all of the Coach "Rod" mini-scandals. I don't share all of his concerns. He's being overly cynical. Album broaches the accusations that Rodriguez shredded files inappropriately. He comments with clear incredulity: "Rodriguez admits he destroyed some files, but says trust me, they didn't matter."

Every coach will get rid of files when leaving a school. I destroyed records, correspondences and other information about students and classes that were nobody else's business when I left my old school. And I was just a dinky English teacher. Rodriguez had personal files too. If he no longer needed his notes he should destroy them. No one has made a solid and substantiated claim that university files are missing or that Rodriguez shredded files that didn't belong to him. Let's move on.

Albom's comments decrying the importance of recruiting ring of overly opportunistic criticism. He didn't seem to hold Steve Fisher's highly valued recruiting of cagers against him. That famous quintet almost won a championship in 1992 and 1993 and I never heard any complaining that valuing such talented players was a step in the wrong direction.

One of Carr's greatest assets was his recruiting. He knew how to get players that would play for him. His recruiting classes were consistently highly ranked. He didn't mine his talent from the basement of Angell Hall.

Michigan has always recruited well--just not quarterbacks. And not mobile quarterbacks. But now that a new coach with a very different system has come in it's very important that the right players who look ready to carry out his methods get on board reasonably soon. And a highly recruited QB is always going to get more attention than a highly recruited running back or offensive lineman.

Albom also doesn't like that this whole process started because Athletic Director Bill Martin felt the need to recruit outside Michigan. As Albom sees it Michigan is courting trouble by tapping a coach who was too willing to leave WVU awkwardly.

"Michigan football used to be more special. It was never sullied with departure lies or shredding, because it promoted from within."

The history of Michigan men hasn't been spotless. Carr succeeded Michigan's own crop, Gary Moeller, who resigned because of a drunken tantrum at a bar. Is that what Michigan nurtures? No. That's one man's story and one mistake that doesn't reflect on a system.

Is the new contract problematic? Does the $2.5-million contract with a $4-million buyout look like trouble? If Rodriguez can command this from any other team should he simply respect some Michigan tradition of avoiding that game by keeping it in the family even tho he's not being promoted from within. And shouldn't any team work to attract and keep a coach it wants while protecting itself reasonably? Such a buyout clause could be intended as a deterrent to other teams than a trap for the coach. Of course I hope that Michigan will do all it can to make Ann Arbor a town that Rodriguez chooses to live in regardless of a contract.

I like a lot of Michigan's traditions. I love that they don't adorn the field with a gaudy logo. I like the conservative play calling. I like the low scoring games that show skill doesn't mean big plays and high numbers. I love that there are no stickers on the helmets. And I love that they win because of all of this.

Albom indicts Michigan for getting a coach who not only wants to win but also recruit players who will play as he asks.

"If so, Michigan has jumped in the same mucky waters as many other win-crazed schools, who are only concerned with BCS, not the BS it requires."

I don't get it. Should Michigan be concerned with "the BS [the BCS] requires"?

Well it requires winning. The Big Ten requires winning. Getting to the Rose Bowl requires winning. Beating OSU requires winning.

I hope Rodriguez is determined to win while begetting a future of winning. Michigan's last 3 coaches knew each other and worked with each other. And those 3 generations connected 1969 to 2008. But it all started because Michigan was willing to bring in an outsider. A coach who was trained and reared by the rival system.

Michigan has worked with and succeeded because of adaptation -- not in spite of it. And NCAA football is being played at a level that requires teams to change if they hope to succeed. I hope Rodriguez is unwilling to compromise many of Michigan's traditions. But some traditions do nothing for us.

We can lament that the program is moving in new directions. Or we can be OK with innovation.

For some reason I feel compelled to support the latter. Michigan didn't always have the winged helmets you know.

The seven faces of me

The revelation of Herschel Walker's multiple personality disorder is bound to be discussed by scads of Monday-morning psychiatrists (I could have used 'arm-chair psychiatrists' but that's not a great differentiation is it?)

The phonologist in me says - His personalities are in complementary distribution.

The historical linguist in me says - I wonder if I can figure out what his parents' personalities were.

The semanticist in me says - Are are his personalities ±Herschel? Is 'Herschel' the prototype of his identity?

The syntactician in me says - This looks like a substitution test for constituency.

The experimental linguist in me says - His judgments of his personalities aren't reliable. I need to use various methods to elicit responses from a large enough group before I decide which personalities are possible.

And the prescriptivist in me will take this opportunity to say - Everybody is saying that he has schizophrenia but that's an incorrect use of the term. Schizophrenia is a different type of disorder distinct from dissociative identity disorder, which is included in the category of general dissociative disorders. So stop misusing the term unless you want to show that you have no education or training in mental disorders.

And "I" say - I actually agree with my prescriptivist-self on this one.

Hail to the homewreckers

They really can't blame Michigan. If they had treated their men right...

Lies damn lies and sports

When I started following hockey and college football back in the Eighties I learned of the necessity for a difference between a winning streak and an unbeaten streak. (The same distinction is necessary in the NFL but ties are not common enough to make the difference salient.) For a while I thought it was just an optimistic and pessimistic way of saying the same thing. Then I learned that the semantics went beyond attitude.

So a winning streak does entail an unbeaten streak; and when a team ties a game the unbeaten streak continues but the winning streak is over. So an unbeaten streak is less impressive than a win streak. But it's not too shabby.

Because of the point system in hockey it was a relevant statistic. The team got two points for a win one point for a tie and no points for a loss. Well that changed several years ago. Ever since the 1999-2000 season a team earns one point if the regulation period ends in a tie even if the team loses the game during the overtime period. Of course the other team gets two points for the win. And now there are no more ties. The game will always be decided; if necessary by a shootout.

This has introduced a new phrase for another somewhat relevant streak: the point streak. Even if a team loses a game the streak is still intact as long as the regulation period ends in a tie. A winning streak entails an unbeaten streak which then entails a point streak. And of course a point streak is less impressive.

And as far as headlines and sports commentary go there are several other streaks entailed by all these so far mentioned.

One AP headline today announces the end of one team's streak that isn't very significant and really not too impressive:

Canucks' 14-game home point streak ends

Over the course of those 14 home games (which stretch back to Nov 9) the Canucks have also played 14 away games. Their record in those away games is 5 wins 7 losses and 2 overtime losses. Combined with their home record over that period (before today's loss) the Canucks have won 17 games and lost 11. Four of those losses were tied at the end of 60 minutes so they get moved over into the points column.

There are several ways to make their performance sound impressive. One line late in the story extends the span of the accomplishment by mentioning that their previous home loss was back on November 1. That statistic give the illusion of adding more than a week to their streak even though their next home game (the game that started the streak) was 8 days later.

Another trick to make their performance sound more impressive: They're second in their division: the Northwest division of the Campbell Conference. But they're technically the 5th place team in the conference. And they're 18 points behind the conference leading Detroit Red Wings.

Sort the league into 2 conferences and it's possible for the best team in one conference to fall below the 50th percentile overall. Divide each of those categories into three divisions and it's possible for the best team in a division to be around the bottom 15th percentile.

In sports such a case is unlikely. And this isn't such a case. The Canucks are not a bad team. And they haven't been playing badly over this span of time. They're comfortably over .500 in their record. But it's been no more than a mediocre run.

17-11: and they get a headline calling it a streak.
_

It is the cost. It is the cost.

It's unfortunate that some women are given the brunt of the blame for the failings of a man. Desdemona certainly was not the cause. Lady MacBeth might have been. So what about Jessica Simpson? Her on screen appearances during the Dallas/Philadelphia game have elicited a lot of vitriol. Some people are arguing that Tony Romo was distracted and that's why he played so badly.

I love Bettyboo's comment on this OMG!/Yahoo! piece: "From the start I knew that Jessica (the air head) was going to cause the Cowboys the game."

That looks like an eggcorn in there. To cause the game is an obvious mishearing of to cost the game. Is there a reasonable semantic reanalysis? Well first let's see if there's enough of this going on. First I'm going to go with 'caused us the game' in my initial search.

[...sound of tapping on computer keyboard...]

Wow. Yeah it's out there. A Google™ search for "Caused us the game" brings up 6720 hits. And the first five are all what I was hoping to find.

"Any fool can see that is what caused us the game" source

"h3po4 did an really nice \kill on map16, almost caused us the game" source

"Ultimately, this is what caused us the game." source

"but we were unable to capitalize on their mistakes and it caused us the game." source

"'It was not the untimely timeout that caused us the game ' explained Cuban" source

Bettyboo uses a form that makes it look like she has heard 'cost the game' and interpreted it as 'caused the game' so she changes the verb according to a standard grammar when she chooses the phrase "going to cause" instead of 'caused the game' in her comment.

This morphology is out there too. A search for "cause them the game" gets 12,300 hits. How many of them relevant? Enough.

"which will cause them the game in the end." source

"one little mistake done by a teammate can cause them the game" source

"He threw two late interceptions which cause them the game." source
(this one doesn't follow the standard rules of verb tense. It could be an 'eary' spelling. You know--one of those errors that makes me type throw when I meant to type throat just because they sound so similar.)

"This decision may cause them the game which is unfortunate" source

One result looks like a gapped construction.
"however lack of focus could cause them the game and loose ground to Inter Milan." source

The coordination with that second phrase that doesn't have a subject makes me think the writer might have intended to say 'could cause them to lose the game and lose ground to Inter Milan.' In that case it would have nothing to do with the cost→caused eggcorn.

But it could still be a relevant example if the writer meant to produce something like 'lack of focus could cause them the game and to lose ground' -- which would be sweet. Zeugma and an eggcorn relying on each other.

That might be too much to ask.

[Update:
The cost→caused construction has been mentioned and discussed already on The Eggcorn Database. I didn't mention it here but one the EcDb forum I noted that one necessary condition of an eggcorn (the semantic reanalysis) was unclear to me. What exactly would 'caused the game' mean? The last example above looks like a possible effect of a blend and that might be just what's going on in these examples. But it's not a clear failure. If a clear meaning and semantic motivation can be found for 'caused the X' this would work as an eggcorn.]

_

Michigan vs Notre Dame: which fight song is harder to sing with a straight face?

I will always bleed blue. I just didn't know it would be from such a ripping wound.

Last week I went to Purdue's rout of the Eastern Illinois Panthers. And lightning struck. And the stadium was cleared. And few fans returned. But the faithful who returned to Ross-Ade Stadium had the thrilling opportunity to cheer and bellow in approval of Curtis Painter's record-tying 6 TD passes.

Michigan's first two home games have not been so exciting--for Wolverine fans. Lightning struck. And the Wolverines were burned. And The Big House was cleared. Only the faithful will return.

After last week's games I had to resort to phonetics for an argument that Michigan is an easier team to root for than Purdue. Most stadiums have familiar cheers that the home fans know how to perform. At Michigan it's a very simple and effective exchange of "Go!" and "Blue!" from one side of the stadium to the other.

[go:::ʊ]!
[blu::::]!

It works well because it emphasizes two simple vowels with stable formants. They're back vowels with good energy in the low second formant making a nice resonant roar with a lot of energy at those lower frequencies.

The Purdue crowd yells "Go Boilers!" in the same cross-stadium exchange. Boilers isn't as good for the cheer. The [ɔ] in "Boilers" is hard to maintain. It's shorter because it falls into the [ɪ] of the diphthong killing that 2nd formant. Then the [lɹ̩z] syllable has no true vowel in it. And a second unstressed syllable composed mostly of approximants just doesn't create much of a boom.

But who needs sustained back vowels when you're scoring so much more than your opponent? I'll take TDs over IPA in a football game.

Last year the Michigan/Notre Dame game was a contest between two promising 2-0 teams: the winningest team in the history of I-A football (vs the 2nd winningest) and the team with the highest winning percentage (vs the 2nd highest). Tomorrow will be an unprecedented 0-2/0-2 showdown between a two teams that have never before been played each other when neither was ranked (since 1936 when ranking began).

It's a coin toss. I just hope it comes up heads.


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Snow image from here.

Coin image from here.