Please, please, please can someone take sportscasters aside and teach them English?
It’s not that it drives me nuts when I watching sports, it’s that they are pretty much destroying the sense of the language for a good portion of my students.
It’s not just the piling up of clichés, although that’s bad enough. They (and their kin on the inky side) have already pretty much convinced a generation that “famous” and “infamous” are equivalent and that simple coincidence is irony. I once heard a broadcaster describe the opening kick-off of a football game as the “ensuing” kick-off. And today, after the somewhat wild finish of the Turkey-Croatia soccer match, one Canadian announcer described the result as “incredulous.”
(By the way, the contrast between a lot of North American sports folks and the British folk who’ve been covering soccer is pretty “incredulous.” Talk about using language for the sheer joy of it.)
I’m not a language fuddy-duddy. I appreciate a clever turn of phrase, a pun, a new coinage. But there is nothing creative about misusing language through sloppiness. And it’s particularly galling when that misuse rubs off on impressionable young journalists-in-the-making.
Actually, instead of cursing the darkness, maybe I ought to start lighting candles: sending dictionaries to sports folks, with the appropriate pages marked.
