language - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

USA Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on Racially Coded Language in SportsBaseball is America’s national pastime, but the use of racially coded language when referring to players is not a phenomenon that’s specific only to baseball. Certainly, if you’ve heard about an NFL cornerback with “deceptive speed” or an NBA guard with “outstanding leadership qualities,” you can ma...

Report: Elite Runners Will No Longer Be Called “Losers”Buck up, elite runners! You are no longer in any danger of being called a loser—in an official capacity, at least....

Who Is We?This past December, the New York Times ran a perfectly anodyne post promoting a new episode of The Daily, its popular podcast, and found itself mildly embarrassed. The problem wasn’t the actual substance of what it had published, a straightforward accounting of how the national-security establishmen...

Attention: Half Of Canada Calls Kickball "Soccer Baseball"

Alarming news from the north....

What You're Doing When You Call My Brother "Retarded"

I have never been a violent person, at least not instinctively. Whenever I was teased as a child—I struggled to read for much of elementary school and wore a lot of white jeans, so I was teased a lot—I’d opt for silence or a quick joke, usually at my own expense. I’d level my aggressor with my appar...

Curious-Ass Scholars Look Into "-Ass" As A Modifier

[Adjective]-ass [noun]. It’s a construction equally dear to elite-ass athletes and cool-ass bloggers—and even a few academic-ass linguists, as this illuminating post from JSTOR’s Daily blog reveals. An intensifier that renders its adjective friend that much pungent or that much more emphatic, “-ass”...

There Should Be A "Soo" For Expressing Emphasis

Often, when I want to express emphasis I write “soo” instead of “so.” And even if no one else thinks this should be generally adopted, I think I’m right and they’re wrong....

Report: NFL Team Wants Player To Pay To Play For Them

Here is a dumb thing!...

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The NFL Has Some Questions About The N-Word

This tweet, from the Palm Beach Post's Andrew Abramson, who spoke with some NFL refs about the new emphasis on policing players' bad language, suggests all sorts of funny possibilities: ...

by Samer Kalaf|nfl

|Fri Aug 01 2014

Sneakers, gym shoes, tennis shoes, jumpers, sand shoes (?), running shoes, runners, or trainers? The New York Times has an interactive survey on local dialects, and it's accurate to a really creepy level. But really, who says sand shoes? ...

by Kyle Wagner|surveys

|Mon Dec 23 2013

The Many Dialects Of American English, In One Charming Video

This June, Joshua Katz of NC State put together some beautiful dialect maps of the United States based on data from the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey, revealing, among other fun facts, that Eastern Wisconsin and Rhode Island are the only places that mispronounce "water fountains" as "bubblers":...

by Reuben Fischer-Baum|maps

|Tue Nov 26 2013

The Magic Word

The greatest word in baseball is "horseshit." This isn't a matter of opinion, it's a scientific fact. From Kevin Kerrane’s fine book, Dollar Sign on the Muscle:...

by Alex Belth|Kevin

|Mon Aug 12 2013

High School Umpire Orders Players To Stop Speaking Spanish

Gadsden (N.M.) High School is in a district where 97 percent of the students are Hispanic, so members of the Panthers baseball team are used to speaking to each other in Spanish. But in a game on Tuesday, they were told to cut it out by an umpire who threatened to eject anyone who spoke anything but...

by Barry Petchesky|baseball

|Fri Apr 12 2013

Gentlemen, Please Stop Crushing Vaginas

I was hanging out with a friend yesterday, and at some point during our conversation, we both agreed that the epidemic of American brosephs "crushing" and "killing" things has gotten way out of hand....

by Drew Magary|Balls Deep

|Mon Jun 17 2013

A Comprehensive Analysis Of Grantland's Diction So Far

Grantland has now been live for almost 30 hours, which means that any impressions of the content of the site are going to be largely based on preconceived opinions and biases. The above word cloud and following word frequency analysis are asinine, which is the point....

by dmr|Grantlandia

|Mon Jun 17 2013

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