Right off the bat, you can probably name a long list of common idioms that come from baseball. For example, “right off the bat.” But how about some of the more obscure ones, like the “Linda Ronstadt“? In a nod to Ronstadt’s song “Blue Bayou,” her name is used in baseball to refer to a ball that blew by you. Paul Dickson has collected this and hundreds of other baseball terms in his comprehensive book, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Common Idioms from Baseball”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
The sport of baseball has given us so many words and phrases. I mean, right off the bat, I can think of several. Right off the bat, for example, is one. But even if you’re not a baseball fan, you use baseball language every day, right? We talk about touching base with somebody or taking a rain check. Hitting a home run. Hitting a home run, stepping up to the plate, three strikes and you’re out, pinch hit. There’s so many of those.
And there are many, many, many, many more in the Dixon Baseball Dictionary. And every once in a while, I take down this volume by Paul Dixon, which is almost 1,000 pages with all this baseball language, and just peruse it because it’s got some really fascinating stuff in there. And there are some terms that I think should be part of regular American speech that aren’t, that are in this book.
For example, Grant, do you know what a Linda Ronstadt is? No. You might say that that pitch was a real Linda Ronstadt, and that is a reference to the 1971 song by Linda Ronstadt, Blue Bayou. Oh, I’m coming back again. Yeah, exactly, because it blew by you. Oh! Isn’t that great? So I feel like I want to adopt that into my regular everyday speech, and if somebody says something that just goes right over my head, I’m going to say, gosh, that was a real Linda Ronstadt.
Maybe you’ll give them something else that goes right over their head. Right. Well, my baseball term that I love, I did an entry for this in my old double-tongued dictionary. It’s to scuffle. It means to fail or to not play well, to be in a slump. So if you’re scuffling out there, you’re just not doing well on the baseball field. Oh, interesting. And it’s probably related to a term that Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines as to struggle as by working odd jobs to get by. So they’re similarly related, but it’s not really common.
And I just love it when baseball is this holding place for these terms that have left the common speech, but still there they are. Oh, that’s nice. Right there. The scuffle. Yeah.
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