Foreign Sport Idioms

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jay. I’m calling from Boston.

Jay, hello.

How are you doing? What can we help with?

Well, I was calling to ask about sports idioms and figures of speech, and to be more specific, how they translate or how they are analogous in different languages and cultures.

I’m a cab driver here in Boston, and I hear all kinds of languages in my cab, and I had a Brit and a Yank in the back, and the Brit says to the Yank, and that was, I can’t believe we got that meeting. That was an 89-minute goal for sure.

And the American guy says, what? And I said, he means a Hail Mary. And the guy’s like, oh, I understand.

So, you know, I’m just curious, things like we say in the ballpark, do they say, you know, on the soccer pitch, you know, some things probably translate well, some things don’t.

You know, when people talk about quarterbacking a meeting or something was a home run, do they say, oh, that was a wild sixer? How does that translate and how does that get treated in other languages?

Oh, it totally depends on the sports idiom. Some of the baseball terminology, some of the baseball idioms have actually made their way back across the Atlantic, like home run, and you will see them pop up in speeches and in newspapers. And of course, the Brits know that they’re American and decry them. It doesn’t stop them from taking their place in the British English.

Others are completely untranslatable. You have some great examples here. These are wonderful.

Yeah, an 89-minute goal. So that takes the whole match almost, right? Because a soccer football game is 90 minutes long, right?

Right. Okay. So at the last minute?

Yeah. Pull it out at the last minute.

So it really depends on what we’re talking about here. Some of this stuff doesn’t come back either. Americans might have heard that that’s not cricket, meaning that’s not the way things are done, but we don’t probably use that.

And I think the British, because of their exposure to American television, have a lot of that going on. They’ll understand it through context, but they wouldn’t use it themselves.

I’m curious if the soccer analogies are more universal because the game is played more, whereas some sports that are very American, like baseball and football, you know, just those would not travel or translate well, I’m sure.

It’s true, but sometimes the idioms can travel without the sport. Quarterbacking shows a little signs of having done that, where it’s kind of separated from its origins and lives on its own without having to be associated with the sport.

That’s what’s happening to some of the baseball language. It’s not common, but it does happen and we can find it. It’s just the cross-contamination of these different English dialects is too huge.

We watch a lot of their media, listen to a lot of their media, same for them of ours. So it’s just too much going back and forth.

There may, by the way, be an equivalent to quarterbacking. It’s not that common. But if you talk about Thursday morning tippy-tappy, that’s kind of like Monday morning quarterbacking.

Wait a minute.

Now, I don’t know if this is a real thing that people use, but it did come up in one of my lists here. I made a note of it.

So tippy-tappy refers to just kind of light passing back and forth on the soccer pitch, right? And then, so Thursday morning, tippy-tappy. It was to talk about all the kind of like bad plays of the night before.

So presumably Wednesday nights are the big football nights over there.

Yeah, I don’t know. I have no idea. But this is what I’ve uncovered. I’m not very well exposed to that language. I thought it was really a nice phrase, though.

So here we go. Thursday morning tippy-tappy.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure. But, you know, it’s a really good question, and it sounds like you are in a great position to bring more questions like this to us. We’d welcome your call in the future.

Okay.

Will do.

Very, very good. Thanks for calling. We really appreciate it. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, there are lots of these great sports metaphors, like up stumps. Do you know this one from crickets? Up stumps?

Yes, yes.

What’s that mean?

You abandon the game.

Oh, you make them up?

Yeah, yeah. We up stumps and move to Dublin or something like that.

And move to Dublin.

Yeah, and then there are great ones in other languages as well. Certainly in Spanish, there are a lot of soccer-influenced phrases like transpirar la camiseta, which means to make your jersey really sweaty, which means that you worked really, really, really hard.

Okay, very good, very, very good. And that appears outside of a soccer context.

Yes, or to score a goal from midfield. It’s sort of like a Hail Mary pass or something like that.

Very good. We’d love to hear your sports idioms that you think are untranslatable, particularly if they’re from outside the United States.

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