They came to play. Well, what else would they have come for, to show off their needlepoint collection? To exchange recipes?<\/p>\n
My addiction to professional sports is limited to watching the Boston Celtics in basketball, the Oakland Raiders in football and whoever is playing in the world series.<\/p>\n
During the time I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve fed this addiction, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve acquired quite an arsenal of sports clich\u00c3\u00a9s, metaphors that describe things that are not.<\/p>\n
But first, a mini-English lesson:<\/p>\n
A metaphor, as my English teacher used to say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153is an impossible comparison.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Calling a man a tiger or a woman a cougar is using a metaphor. If you say they merely act like tigers and cougars, well, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re using a simile. But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a topic for another column.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, too many people think of sports as real life, and the clich\u00c3\u00a9s that sportscasters and sportswriters conjure up make the creators seem as if sports were all that mattered. And to some it is.<\/p>\n
In an old episode of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Alice,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a sit-com starring Polly Holiday as Flo and Linda Lavin as Alice, their boss, diner-owner Mel, asked an orchestra leader if he would play, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goalpost of life.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Now waaiiitt a minute. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t intend to be sacrilegious, merely to identify an actual song with lyrics by Bobby Bare. The amazing thing about the combination of words is that the writer thinks of a goalpost as that which one must acquire, attain, reach, cross, etc. in order to make it through life successfully.<\/p>\n
Now how about the drop kick metaphor? A good kicker, like Sebastian Janikowski, ought to be able to split the uprights (another sports clich\u00c3\u00a9), quite easily.<\/p>\n
Therefore, the one seeking help obviously is hoping for a huge divine advantage. The first few lines of the song are:<\/p>\n
Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life<\/p>\n
End over end, neither left nor to right<\/p>\n
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights<\/p>\n
Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life<\/p>\n
My first in-depth discussion of the song was with my venerable teacher, later a colleague at Highlands, John Adams, who asked me if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d heard about the song. In those days, some 20 years ago, there were fewer TV channels available here, and people didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t record their programs on Tivo. So the probability of many people having watched the same program, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Alice,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was greater then.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There is so much implied through such a song title,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the professor of English said. So we talked more about those figures of speech called metaphors. He said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153goalposts,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the things that kickers try to punch the pigskin through. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why do they call goalposts \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcuprights?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and why is a football a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpigskin?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d we wondered.<\/p>\n
I mentioned having watched an NFL playoff game in which a player dropped what might have been the game-winning pass. My wife, Bonnie, who would much rather watch Masterpiece Theater than football, walked by during the groaning emanating from the den and announced to my football buddies, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I guess your player couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t find the handle.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Well, footballs don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t come with handles (another metaphor), but what concerned me more was Bonnie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s temerity in venturing into metaphor-land and sounding even more learned than some of the announcers. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t find the handle!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d My left foot.<\/p>\n
Those who live by the sports clich\u00c3\u00a9 and the sports metaphor clearly are far removed from what the original terminology of the sports used to be. The football field has become the gridiron. And in other games, notice one can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t call a spade a spade. No, they call it something else. Nobody ever questions calling a baseball field a diamond, simply because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shaped that way.<\/p>\n
And Norm Ellenberger, former head coach of the UNM Lobos (a hoops team), chose an interesting metaphor in defending against Lobogate charges: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m waiting to get my turn to bat.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\nBases loaded is called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153three ducks on the pond,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and when the Dallas Mavericks just recently overcame huge leads to defeat the Miami Heat, what was the sports clich\u00c3\u00a9 employed? \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They can smell blood in the water.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
And, to satisfy any metaphor craving you might have, here are a few more, some of which can apply to any competition, even checkers:<\/p>\n
They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re off to the races now.<\/p>\n
They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re hitting on all cylinders.<\/p>\n
This one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in the bag.<\/p>\n
This is just a walk in the park for them now.<\/p>\n
They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going for the jugular.<\/p>\n
They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re really lighting up the scoreboard.<\/p>\n
This is a real pressure cooker.<\/p>\n
And don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t forget Leslie Nielsen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mixed metaphor in Naked Gun, when he referred to the top of the ninth, fourth-and-10, and a full-court press. Enjoy these metaphoric clich\u00c3\u00a9s, but be sure to give 110 percent.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
You might have noticed the amount of Internet traffic about fireworks in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
So what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wrong with this picture? At least three things:<\/p>\n
One would hope there were more people who would \u00e2\u20ac\u201d just this once \u00e2\u20ac\u201d realize that a few minutes of ear-popping merriment also causes damage. Dogs and other animals go crazy at the sound of these explosives. Horses get spooked. Roofs get ignited by falling fireworks.<\/p>\n
I hope the generous rainfall we had Monday night doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t let people slip into complacency, with the idea that all our worries are over.<\/p>\n
No, that bit of precipitation assuredly is not nearly enough to undo months of drought, the like of which people in this area have not seen in decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They came to play. Well, what else would they have come for, to show off their needlepoint collection? To exchange recipes? My addiction to professional sports is limited to watching the Boston Celtics in basketball, the Oakland Raiders in football and whoever is playing in the world series. During the time I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve fed this addiction, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=779"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":780,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}