词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Baseball in American English

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: July 15, 2004

INTRODUCTION: Major League Baseball had its All Star Game Tuesday night. And, for the seventh time in the last eight years, top players from the American League defeated the National League. That means the American League will have the home-field advantage again in the World Series at the end of the season.

Now, our Wordmasters step up to the plate, to help give you a home-field advantage with some of the many baseball-related expressions in American English. Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble talked to a linguist¹ at Berkeley and found out that we can thank sportswriters for many these terms.

AA: Baseball started in the eighteen-hundreds, and Maggie Sokolik says writers made up colorful ways to describe the game. After all, in those days, there was no television to watch the national pastime²!

RS: A lot of those phrases hit a home run with Americans, so today even people who don't follow baseball might still talk about doing something "right off the bat."

SOKOLIK: "And if you can imagine a baseball striking³ the bat, that instant that things happen, things go very quickly, so if you need to do something fast, you might want to do it right off the bat. Similarly now if you have a large plan, say in business, in which you need to accomplish several tasks, you might tell your colleagues that you've 'touched all the bases,' you've contacted people -- you've 'covered your bases' as well, that is, you've prepared adequately."

RS: Which means that you've probably gone beyond rough estimates, or "ballpark figures."

SOKOLIK: "Often if we're talking, and perhaps we're negotiating⁴, perhaps we might say, 'you know, we're not even in the same ballpark,' meaning my figures are so different from yours that we're not even communicating about them."

AA: "Why a ballpark?"

SOKOLIK: "Well, we have this notion⁵ of a ballpark as being a sort of rough area. The playing field doesn't really have a definite boundary. The diamond itself does, but what extends beyond the diamond doesn't have a specific dimension assigned to it. Similarly with time, an inning can be five minutes, an inning could be fifty minutes, it just depends on how long it takes to get all the outs in."

AA: "And it's still if you get three strikes you're out."

SOKOLIK: "Exactly."

AA: "And it's not just in baseball anymore. We hear that now in laws. I know in California, if you commit three serious crimes ..."

SOKOLIK: "Yes, three felonies and then I think it's a lifetime sentence after that. It 's call the 'three-strike law,' three strikes and you're in prison. I think a less happy baseball metaphor⁶ than most of them are."

RS: "Do you have a favorite baseball expression?"

SOKOLIK: "I think the ones that I like, there's a lot of baseball expressions that really focus on people making mistakes, because errors in baseball are sort of what make the game interesting and exciting and also make us scream and tear our hair out in the stands. So when you talk about people being 'off base' -- or 'way off base' in fact -- that means that they're really quite wrong. There's also the term, to call someone a 'screwball' which is a type of pitch, but also means that someone is sort of crazy and not thinking straight. If we talk about someone who's really capable, we talk about them being 'on the ball.'"

RS: "Do you see that our baseball vocabulary is evolving, especially since we are attracting athletes from outside the United States, from Central and South America, from Japan. Do you find that with these players coming to the United States, that they're also bringing a new vocabulary into baseball?"

SOKOLIK: "Well, interestingly enough, not a lot, because the answer is that American baseball vocabulary has begun to travel overseas, so the language they bring with them is that which was exported to begin with."

AA: As far as creating new terms, Maggie Sokolik at the University of California at Berkeley says American baseball is in a slump⁷. Still there are more baseball-related phrases out there than most people realize.

RS: In fact, University of Missouri Professor Gerald Cohen tells us the earliest citations⁸ for "jazz" had nothing to do with music. San Francisco newspaper writer "Scoop⁹" Gleeson used the term "jazz" in nineteen-thirteen to describe enthusiasm and spirit on the baseball field.

AA: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is。。。。。。And you can find all of our programs at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

[Interview first aired on VOA in April 2001]

 

1 linguist   

n.语言学家；精通数种外国语言者

参考例句：

• I used to be a linguist till I become a writer.过去我是个语言学家，后来成了作家。
• Professor Cui has a high reputation as a linguist.崔教授作为语言学家名声很高。

2 pastime   

n.消遣，娱乐

参考例句：

• Playing chess is his favourite pastime.下棋是他最喜爱的消遣。
• Baseball is the national pastime.棒球是全民性的休闲运动。

3 striking   

adj.显著的，惹人注目的，容貌出众的

参考例句：

• There is a striking difference between Jane and Mary.简和玛丽之间有显著的差异。
• What is immediately striking is how resourceful the children are.最令人注目的是孩子们的机智聪明。

4 negotiating   

n. 谈判 动词negotiate的现在分词

参考例句：

• They were coerced into negotiating a settlement. 他们被迫通过谈判解决。
• We want to get all the parties back to the negotiating table. 我们想把有关各方拉回到谈判桌上来。

5 notion   

n.概念，意念，看法

参考例句：

• One common Chinese notion is that the elders ought to be respected.中国人共有的一种观念是长者应受到尊敬。
• He had a sudden notion to visit all his relatives.他心血来潮，突然想去拜访他所有的亲戚。

6 metaphor   

n.隐喻，暗喻

参考例句：

• Using metaphor,we say that computers have senses and a memory.打个比方，我们可以说计算机有感觉和记忆力。
• In poetry the rose is often a metaphor for love.玫瑰在诗中通常作为爱的象征。

7 slump   

n.暴跌，意气消沉，（土地）下沉；vi.猛然掉落，坍塌，大幅度下跌

参考例句：

• She is in a slump in her career.她处在事业的低谷。
• Economists are forecasting a slump.经济学家们预言将发生经济衰退。

8 citations   

n.引用( citation的名词复数 )；引证；引文；表扬

参考例句：

• The apt citations and poetic gems have adorned his speeches. 贴切的引语和珠玑般的诗句为他的演说词增添文采。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• Some dictionary writers use citations to show what words mean. 有些辞典的编纂者用引文作例证以解释词义。 来自辞典例句

9 scoop   

n.铲子，舀取，独家新闻；v.汲取，舀取，抢先登出

参考例句：

• In the morning he must get his boy to scoop it out.早上一定得叫佣人把它剜出来。
• Uh,one scoop of coffee and one scoop of chocolate for me.我要一勺咖啡的和一勺巧克力的。