On The Stick

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Candice.

Hi, where are you calling from?

Dallas, Texas.

Dallas, Texas.

Well, welcome, Candice, from Dallas.

What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question about a certain phrase.

I recently got an email, and it was a team-wide email, CC’d to about 10 people.

And the title of the email was, On the Stick.

Body of the email was really talking about some protocol that we’d been missing as a team and you know our manager really wanted us to stay on the stick, be on the stick, and about five of us responded independently of each other and were like do you mean on the ball because she used it in the way that you would use the term on the ball and she said no no no on the stick, on the stick, on the stick.

And we all thought she was a little crazy.

And I can’t find reference to the phrase anywhere.

However, I am new to Texas. I’m actually from Seattle.

So I was wondering whether or not it’s a regional thing, if the phrase is actually real, or if she’s confused, because sometimes she gets a little confused.

Not that I don’t love my boss, because she’s great.

But I had no idea what was going on and I thought you guys would be able to tell me.

Wow.

So get on the stick.

She wanted you to what?

Get your act together?

Yeah, on the stick.

We all want to be on the stick as a team.

I see.

On the ball as a team makes sense to me, but on the stick makes no sense whatsoever.

Or at least I haven’t heard it before.

Oh, that’s interesting to me.

That’s incredibly interesting.

I’m surprised that so many people out of 10 had never heard the term before.

Is it a common phrase?

Yeah.

Yeah, it kind of is.

So she wanted you all to stop talking about grammar and get back to work?

I mean, does this happen a lot in your office or wherever you are?

Well, no.

She just has a habit of mixing phrases.

She’s done it a couple of times where she’s mixed phrases.

So I think we were all sort of teasing her.

But then it became this search of what’s the origin of all that, and we couldn’t find it anywhere.

So nobody got any work done that afternoon, right?

No, we ignored everybody.

Who needs social work when you can find things on the Internet?

Yes, the great time waster.

Okay.

Well, okay, you’ve called the right place because we make some small effort to get on the stick when it comes to finding answers for questions like these.

First of all, your boss didn’t invent this, and it’s not a mixed metaphor.

It is a standard idiom in American English.

So she’s covered there.

It’s good for the boss to be right, right?

Yeah.

Always.

And the thing that interests me the most about this is that I was kind of surprised when I first ran across the origin of this that all of the sources that you can check say that it comes from the early days of automobiles.

And it is about the stick shift in an automobile.

Have you ever driven a stick shift or a manual?

I have not.

I’m an automatic girl.

I’m here to a stick shift.

Even on an automatic, you can hear when the car needs to shift gears, there’s a sound that you grow accustomed to where you can hear that it’s just revving too much.

And you need to shift to another gear so the engine doesn’t have to work as hard in order to put out the energy required to maintain the speed, right?

And when you’re driving a manual or a stick, you just learn instinctively.

You can hear the car telling you, now’s the time to shift.

Now’s the time to shift.

And so to get on the stick is to get on that actual, literally get on the stick shift and move it into the proper gear.

And do the thing that needs to be done.

Yeah.

So that’s a good metaphor, right?

That totally makes sense.

And, you know, when we were arguing about it via email, I was picturing the same thing as on the baseball reference, you know, being on the ball, being on the stick.

I thought, like, like a bash.

That’s what I was seeing in my head.

So that makes more sense, the stick shift.

Yeah.

Well, so what about the ball?

Is that the ball on top of the stick shift?

Well, no.

On the ball, there you go, is indeed from baseball.

And as far as I can tell, you know, and the thing about this is that stick and ball are used in so many different metaphors, and they’re very common English words, and they pop up a thousand different places when you barely start looking.

So right now it looks like on the ball comes from baseball, and it’s about throwing a pitch that is just right.

You know, if you are on the ball, it means you’ve got a good game going, you’re throwing the mean stuff, the nasty stuff across the plate.

One interesting thing, and I was looking in the Dictionary of American Regional Language here, that even on the ball is so common that it shows up in Hawaiian as on the kinipopo.

What?

Yeah, kinipopo is ball or baseball in Hawaiian.

So on the kinipopo means to be on the ball or on target.

I can see your boss’s next email right now.

Let’s all get on the kinipopo.

Yeah, it’s catchy, right?

Yeah, it’s a great little, I love the sound of that word, kinipopo, right?

So, Candice, it sounds like you have three options, huh?

I definitely do.

It’s unfortunate that she was correct because that means we can’t tease her anymore.

Oh, you can still tease her about her kinipopo.

And also get on the sticks.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you, Candice, for calling today.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Have a great day.

You too.

Well, the language referees have our whistles in hand, and so call us 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.