Monday, December 27, 2010

Monday Media Rant: Say WHAT?

An historic. What? Who taught you that? Unless you speak a certain British accent where you don’t pronounce the “h” in historic, “an historic” is wrong, for the same reason we don’t say an hysterectomy, an home run, an hero, an hitch, and so on. We say “an hour” because we don’t pronounce the “h” in hour. That’s right. Take it up with the Brits.

I had a chance to…. Well, did you, or didn’t you? How many times have you heard a broadcaster say “I had a chance to interview (name)….”. I had a chance to major in Chemistry, but I didn’t. Why not just say “I interviewed (name) and he/she said….”.

School closings. How do they square that with “road closures”, since they decided to change it from “road closings” last year? For the sake of consistency (and idiocy), why not “school closures?” I howled with laughter one morning last week when I heard a local yokel say “school closings and road closures.”

Play-action pass. Don’t you mean “run-action pass?” Every time the center snaps the ball, it’s a play. The key element is the run action, which mis-directs the defense while the quarterback executes a pass, not a running play.

Offsides. How many sides are there? Two. How many can you be on at any one moment in time? One. Offside.

Former Cy Young winner. Did they take the Cy Young award away from him? Every sportswriter and announcer in the world uses this idiotic form. Same thing with “former Heismann Trophy winner”, although there are actually a few of them! Reggie Bush is a former Heisman Trophy winner, because he had to give it back. All the others are simply “Heisman Trophy Winners”, like Ron Dayne.

Welcome Inside Sports Center. Really? Welcome INSIDE? Who talks like that? The same kind of idiots who say things like “The incident remains under investigation.”

I’ve got a million of ‘em. Ask my wife.

3 comments:

  1. If you tune and tweak that rant, you could be George Carlin.

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  2. Re: former winner, I think the poor dears on the sports shows have adopted this construction because there's no past-tense, so to speak, for "winner". The sportsies want very much to be clear that when they say "winner" they're talking about the contest that just finished. If they can't remember the year in which Ron Dayne won the Heisman they resort to saying "former" to emphasize that he didn't win it in the most recent year that it was awarded, doncha know. Everybody loves a winner but they want to know that feeling good about past winners isn't as important or urgent as feeling good about current winners...or something like that. I don't watch sports anyway, so what do I know?

    The Town Crank
    Neenah

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