Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...
Sue from Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, wants help regarding a dispute with her husband about terms they use in a pickup sport like softball and you don’t have enough players to field a full-size team. If you get onto second base but then have to go back...
Jim in Sacramento, California, was reading The Good Detective (Bookshop|Amazon) by John McMahon, when he came across a description of the Georgia countryside as flatter than a gander’s arch. Just how flat was it, and what’s a gander’s arch? This is...
If a baseball is hit really hard, it’s said that the batter powdered it, used to refer to hitting or pitching that’s especially powerful, as if the ball had been fired from a cannon. Similarly, a pitcher with a blistering fastball is said to be...
In the early days of baseball, the term inside baseball referred to a particular style of play that emphasized sneaky strategies and clever teamwork as opposed to the power hitting that dominates today’s game. Later inside baseball came to refer...
The KPBS Radio Reading Service provides audio recordings of daily newspapers for the visually impaired. A volunteer who reads for the service has trouble understanding some of the jargon from the sports pages. Good references for the language of...