* A few of my favorite things

Baseball, books on language, and Roy Blount, Jr.

So how cool is it to combine all three? The sportswriter and frequent panelist on one of my favorite NPR programs, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me (so make that four things, by extension), recently published Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof: Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences: With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory (whew), includes several entries that refer to baseball.

The first — “baseballese” (pages 33-34) — iis a well-deserved nod to the vernacular of the national pastime and its place in everyday speech. The second — “Berraisms” (36-37) — is uniquely Yogi. Blount compares the Hall of Fame catcher’s malaprops and language miscues with that of another B-man, George W. Bush. Care to guess who comes out on top?

…I recall making the point that while neither man was one you would expect to be the leader of the Free world, the quotations of Yogi were charming in a Zen sort of way, aswhen he said while watching an old Steve Mcqueen movie on television. “He must have that that before he died”….

For the word demean (74-75), Blount offers an example courtesy of the front office of the Cleveland Indians:

What I will do is quote Bob DiBiasio, …vice president of public relations, who when asked whether the Indians’ nickname and logo were demeaning to American Indians, said it was a matter of “individual percetion…The Wall Street Journal did an op-ed piece, and they asked the question, ‘If something is not meant to demean, can it be demeaning?'”

And I will answer the topic question of whoever that columnist was: Yes, dumbass, Of course it can.

I would be sorry, personally, to see the logo’s savvy-looking Chief Wahoo go. He looks like he is thoroughly in on whatever historical ironies the team’s name might imply.

Blount offers an assessment of the word fungo (106-7), as well as “I got it!” as one of the great three-word sentences (124-5):

(According to Ira Berkow’s biography of Red Smith, that distinguished sportswriter’s “least favorite player” was a third baseman named Bill Werber, who was so proud of his college education (from, you guessed it, Duke) that he would correct other players’ grammar. He even admonished his teammate Skeeter Newsome for shouting “I got it, I got it” to signal, as is traditional, that a pop fly was his to catch. “It’s ‘I have it, I have it,’ ” insisted Werber. He was wrong, of course, because grammar is to some extent situational: when two people are attempting communication while running toward roughly the same spot while looking straight up in the air, something as forceful as a hard g-or the ur-consonant, M, in the alternative “Mine! Mine!” — is required.

Under “name, stadium’s, self-contradictory” (204), Blount writes:

For a while after the domed baseball stadium was built in Minneapolis, it was called the Homerdome, because so many home runs were hit there. Then, the rate of home-run-hitting declined. So a baseball writer (see baseballese) in The Sporting News suggested that the stadium be called the Misnomerdome.

He also includes a lenghty entry on “sayings from sports” (261-2) and caps it all of with a mention of Barry Bonds for the word “though” (300).

Oh, and the non-baseball stuff is pretty good, too (Favorite: sesquipedalian).

For an added treat, get the audio version, read by the author.