fosh

fosh
 n.— «Roger Clemens just started doing the “Fosh” and he’s already got another pitch to make batters” knees bend. Tom Gordon thinks the fosh may be his newest out pitch. Like a dance craze that sweeps the nation, the “Foshball” is all the rage in the Red Sox clubhouse. […] It’s held like a fastball, except the fingers are spread slightly apart. It works like an off-speed split-fingered fastball, or a changeup that breaks. Fosh, by the way, is an acronym for the unprintable feeling you get when you watch one go by. The “F” stands for “full,” the “O” is for “of”; the rest Nipper would rather not say.» —“Sox pitchers hit with ‘fosh fever’” by Jimmy Golen in Fort Myers, Florida SouthCoast Today (Florida) Mar. 10, 1996. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Further reading

The Buggy Origins of Crimson

Kim from Council Bluffs, Iowa, notes that kırmızı, the Turkish word for “red,” sounds a lot like the English word crimson. Are they related? Yes! Both derive from a word for the insect whose scientific name is Kermes vermilio. The English words...

Why We Don’t Wave the “Blue, White, and Red”

Why do we speak of the red, white, and blue when discussing the American flag? Why not blue, white, and red or white, red, and blue? A couple of reasons: The color order lodged in the language thanks in part to the patriotic song from the 1840s...

Recent posts