It must be the confluence of the sports world in the fall that causes it. You've got baseball ending in late October or early November. Then there's the blessedly short CFL season during the early fall ending in early November. The NFL runs through the fall into January. Finally the interminably long NHL season from basically September to June. Oh, and the PGA is in there somewhere as well. With all of the sports and over paid players and the scandals comes the grand dame of language – the hyperbole.
For those of you who might not have paid attention during English class, hyperbole is the intentional use of exaggeration. 'I hugged her a thousand times.' 'That was the best coffee in the world.' 'If you take away my cell phone I'll die.' All hyperbole. But it's not just in English class that we see hyperbole.
You hear it every day on the sports news. Athletes talking about the sports arena/field/court as a battlefield and the specific contest in question as a war. Can we not find another euphemism for this. Especially with soldiers on real battlefields fighting real wars. If the game was a close one we could say that it was a hard won victory. That the team pushed hard for the win. But a battlefield? Nope. Don't think so.
Another that I just love to hear is "We just went out there and gave 110%." No you didn't. You might have given all you had and pushed yourself to do your best but there is no way to give more than 100%. By definition 100% is eveything.
The one that got me thinking about this was something I heard the other day on the radio. The player in question said something like, "We overcame great adversity to take the win from them." Great Adversity. Not really. You played a little harder and got the ball over the goal line or the puck in the net or the ball in the basket or… whatever. You did not overcome great adversity. The people who float from Cuba to Florida, in an attempt to gain a better life, through shark infested waters in a leaky bathtub – these people overcome adversity.
To compare sports to a battlefield or to say that you overcame adversity to get another win on the tally sheet demeans the reality of what some people are doing every day. Perhaps if we put two NFL or NHL teams in leaky boats on shark infested waters and they had to play their sport in those conditions, with someone shooting at them, then I might agree with the whole adversity thing.
1 comment:
Heh. Sports cliches are the worst. I often wonder if it's just part of the sports culture, or is really because the athletes and coaches have such a limited vocabulary and ability to express themselves. Maybe they just repeat expresions and desciptions they've heard before? I've always found the expression "giving 110%" (or any amount over 100%), annoying. It's like the people on E-bay that give ratings of A++++ (or more).
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