Marco from San Diego, California, is curious about why sportscasters speak of a player who put English on a ball. The expression appears to have begun with British players of billiards and snooker, who first figured out how to give a ball some extra spin. Body English refers to the way a player or observer twists and turn once a ball is already in motion, as if they could somehow add a little extra spin after the fact. Sports announcers also refer to a ball that’s passed too hard as having a lot of mustard on it. That’s simply a way of comparing that added force to extra “spice.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “English on a Ball”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, good morning. My name is Marco Scavuzzo and I’m from San Diego, California.
Welcome. What can we do for you?
I just had two questions today that are related to sports. I’m an avid sports fan and I’m also a personal trainer. And one of the examples is when an announcer will use the word English in a sport, having a ball, if a player puts an exaggerated spin on it to make it curve a certain way. They might say with some astoundment, wow, there was so much English on that. And I was just wondering a little bit about the history of how that got started.
That’s a great one. And so are we to understand that English on it means that it did something unusual?
Yes, an extra dramatic spin of some sort to make the ball go in an unusual way.
Right, yeah. It comes from billiards or snooker or pool or other games like that are played on the felt tables with balls and cues, that sort of thing. And it supposedly comes from the fact that the British players of snooker and games like that were the first to really understand how to use the spin of a cue ball in order to do new crazy things on the table. And they brought it to the United States where we started calling that effect on a ball English after the English themselves.
Now, there are other theories that I think hold no water that you may find out there, but this is the most solid one that we have the most evidence for the furthest back. All the other theories are new, and there are surmises that don’t really have evidence, so I won’t get into them. But have you heard of body English as well?
No, I have not.
So body English is also sometimes when somebody contorts their body to do something extraordinary, thinking about somebody going up for a layup, and in order to get around their opponent, they’ve got to twist and turn to kind of really put that ball in the basket. That’s called body English. But there’s another kind of body English that I really like, which is the one where you’ve already thrown the ball or the dart or whatever, and you’re waiting for it to do something, and you’re moving your body and your arms as if somehow you can control it from afar.
Oh, yeah, when you go bowling.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Stand behind a bowler. You’re bowling, and you’re like twisting your body to make the ball move. That’s body English as well. It doesn’t actually have any effect, but we all do it, don’t we?
Yeah. So that’s what we know about English, putting English on it. So I was just wondering, maybe it had to do with if English people were causing bad deals by spinning the truth or something like that.
No. Do you find anything like that?
No, not at all. It goes back to at least the mid-1800s, and it’s from the very earliest days. It’s from billiards or snooker or pool or similar games.
Okay. Thank you. And my other question is sports-related. When an announcer will use the word mustard, if a player is receiving a pass and it has been thrown too hard where they cannot control it and they end up dropping the pass, either fumbling it or hitting it out of bounds, they will sometimes say there was a lot of mustard on that one.
Yeah. What was that?
2016, I think we talked about that on the show. You can look it up on our website, but the short version is to put the mustard on a ball means to add a little spice to it. Think about spicy mustard and the little bite that it has, the tang, the oomph. So it’s just really using the food metaphor to mean something sharp’s happening there, something really pungent and pointed.
Yeah, you’re not adding yogurt to it. You’re adding mustard.
Yeah, mustard. Yeah, I thought that it might have something to do with spice, but I was also wondering if there was any evidence for maybe in baseball, they’ve had different cases of pitchers using grease on the ball. And I was thinking maybe like a dark brown granular mustard may have been used as a way to grieve the ball sometimes. I think once that ball ended up in the umpire’s hands that he would smell it, right?
Oh, yeah. As far as I know, there’s no evidence for that. The best source that we know for all baseball language is Paul Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary. So if you have that, he’s got a solid entry on mustard.
Okay. So it was usually first used in baseball?
Yep, comes from baseball and it’s been used for many decades.
Okay. Well, thank you very much.
Marco, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you so much. I love your show.
Thank you. Take care.
Thanks. Bye-bye.
Bye.
