Friday, April 5, 2013

Baseball Linguistics

In honor of the Detroit Tiger's home opener today, I thought I would share some links to posts about baseball and language.

Earlier this week, Ben Yagoda at Lingua Franca wrote about the "pluralification of sports-teams names" in a post titled Play Ball(s). Yagoda noted that "things started to change dramatically in the ’80s. Today, the norm is to talk of (for example) a Yankees game and a Yankees fan; the use of 'Yankee' in those contexts is pretty much limited to the over-50 set." His post included an Ngram chart comparing "Cub fan" to "Cubs fan."

Here is one comparing "Tiger fan" to "Tigers fan." The results are similar to the "Cubs, Cub" results in that "Tigers fan" showed an increase in usage around the '80s; however, "Tiger fan" is still the dominating version whereas "Cubs fan" took over from "Cub fan."


Be sure to check out the full post at the link above.

And here are a couple more:

NPR's How Baseball Explains The Nature Of Language

Wikipedia's Glossary of English-Language Idioms Derived from Baeball

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