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...
The terms ballpark estimate and ballpark figure originated in the 1940s among members of the United States Air Force, who first used “ballpark” to denote an area or theater of military engagement. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
To give it the old college try means “to put forth one’s best effort.” The phrase stems from the early days of baseball, and arose from tension between the few professional college-educated players and those who’d picked up the game on sandlots. The...
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...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work humans...
Jackie from Hinsdale, Illinois, grew up hearing a teasing child described as a corker — playful, rambunctious, and only mildly naughty. The word’s slang sense developed from cork as something that stops or settles matters or ends a debate or...