Words That Sportswriters Use That Make Me Cringe

Just a matter of time till you start seeing "first basehe/him/his" and "second basehe/him/his" ...

 

Just wait until the position of lesser height propels the spheroid in a forward direction into the avenue between Liberal and Moderate Field all the way to the perpendicular impediment, winding up at the tertiary safety platform and forcing the antagonist's administrator to come out and negotiate a temporary settlement with the initiator of action, requiring a successor initiator of action to be summoned from the area of readiness.

And so that'll make it a 4-0 ballgame.

 

Unanswered is often confused with straight.

If a team scores ten straight points on five baskets, followed by an opponent basket after the 10th straight point, only 8 of the points were unanswered.

 

Straight or consecutive?

 

Jones threw three straight curveballs that were all hit out of the park.

 

Big what?

 

Covering girls basketball, I called it a woman-to-woman defense once. Emphasis on once. Even the coach gave me grief over that one.

 

When I was very young, I covered a high school where the boys teams’ nicknames ended in -men and the girls teams’ nicknames ended in -maids. The official name given by the school, mind you.

I unilaterally took the step of eliminating -maids. The readers thought I was an idiot. (I was.) I thought I was taking some brave stand on equality, but instead I was a total jackass. If anything I should have removed the nickname when referring to the girls’ teams and left it at that.

 

I get the changing thinking on using "Lady" for the women's teams. But when you have schools that play girls-boys doubleheaders, and you're often slamming together a bunch of 100-word call-ins into a bigger roundup, it is a very helpful word-- especially in headlines -- to differentiate which team you're talking about.

 

It's not and it's sexist. 'School' girls win, boys lose.

 

Lima Bath in Ohio is the Wildcats.
Their official name for girls' teams is Wildkittens.
Which I find incredibly demeaning and offensive.

 

The "woulds" aren't passive. They're conditional ... and there's no condition about it.