23 February 2006

bobsled hole-in-one?

There have been plenty of observable linguistic tidbits from current coverage of the Turin/Torino games. One in particular is yet another example of sport-lexicon crossover - this time, the broadcasters covering the bobsled event have taken to referring to individual runs with golfing terminology. A good run, as in quicker than you could expect for that team, is a birdie or eagle, while a result matching expectation is par, and bad run is a bogey.

Then this showed up on Sun media:
In a TV chat with CBC about Team Canada's 3-2 win over the Czechs at the Winter Olympics, Gretzky used a football analogy in describing attempts to pass the puck out of the defensive zone. "It's like football, sometimes it's good to hand off because when you hand off, that opens up the passing line," explained Gretzky, executive director of Team Canada.

I'm having a tough time with the analogy, since handing off typically removes passing as an option. But it still counts as an attempt at using the structure (and lexicon) of one sport to discuss strategy in another.

Seeing as I've come across numerous examples of sports terminology jumping from one game to another, I believe it's almost time to develop a predictive model of when it can and can't happen. That will come soon in this space.

not a typo

I just caught an error in an email I was bout to send out - I'd intended to type that an idea I was working on was based "very loosely" on an idea I'd worked on previously. Yet what I typed was "very closely" - if you check your keyboard, you'll see that's no regular typo, as the c key is far from the other keys used in the sequence eryclo. This was a full-on lexical access error (and antonymic to boot). Wondering if anyone had studied this, I looked up LLBA with search terms {lexical and {retrieval or access} and typing}, but none of the hits pertain to my question. Meanwhile, I'm wondering how much of what I've written in the last 20 years on keyboards has included similar errors.