language Page 7 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Actress Shailene Woodley confirms engagement to <em>Jeopardy!</em> nerd Aaron Rodgers
It’s officially official. ...

Vernon Maxwell needs to log off, Tony DeAngelo still talking
Vernon Maxwell will forever be remembered as the guy who went into the stands in Portland and punched a guy right in the face....

There is something about Brady, I just have no idea what it is
Anyway, to the game. Over the next few days, you’ll see plenty of takes, and the term “GOAT”, which needs to be erased from our vernacular yesterday. I don’t know if Brady is the greatest. With an unimaginable seven rings and a record five Super Bowl MVPs, he’s the most decorated, that’s for sure. I...

It’s OK to not be Shaquille O’Neal, and he should realize that
Respectfully, what is it about Shaquille O’Neal — who is in the one percent of most accomplished living human beings on earth — that causes him to engage in rankism?...

USA Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on Racially Coded Language in Sports
Baseball 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...

Let’s Spend Way Too Much Time Scrutinizing The Body Language Of Kyrie Irving And Jayson Tatum In This Rising Stars Clip
As much as the NBA’s Rising Stars Challenge is not an actual game—it’s more of a glorified, mediocre dunk contest with all of the injury risk and none of the payoff—the league insists on maintaining some semblance of the itinerary that actual NBA games have before, during and after the exhibition. S...

The Flyers' Home Opener Went So Badly, They're Swearing
Now, you pieces of shit know that I can’t abide cursing. There’s no fucking reason for an educated, grown man to resort to swear words. How goddamned bad could the Flyers’ home opener against the Sharks have been to spur not one, but two players to work blue?...Oh! Oh. Jesus fishfisting Christ. Yeah...

How Latin Became The Romance Languages
The Latin language is one of the Roman Empire’s lasting legacies. We hear it around us every day in the form of direct Latin loan-words into English, like “abdomen” or “exterior.” Every time you say something is “necessary” or you need to make a “revision” to a document, you’re using a loan-word fro...

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!...

Here's Stephen Curry's Miracle Game-Winner As Called In Spanish And In Russian
Stephen Curry’s multiple-record-breaking series of three pointers tonight against the Thunder sent the Warriors out of Oklahoma City with a win they had absolutely no business taking. None of the threes were more mindblowing, of course, than the last-second-of-overtime long-range bomb that earned th...

Why Did Colin Kaepernick Receive An "Inappropriate Language" Penalty?
After throwing his second interception of the night against the Bears, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was flagged for a 15-yard penalty for "inappropriate language." Kaepernick is the first player to be hit with a penalty of this sort, and while nobody's sharing exactly what Kaepernick said, it'...

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: ...


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":...