I'm living proof that any dunce should be able to succeed at TV work. However, one thing that shrinks my literary sack is a broadcaster with an inadequate grasp of English. You can't emulate Jim McKay or Peter Alliss if you believe a Thesaurus is an extinct dinosaur. If I sound like my mother, that's just fine. She was the personal secretary to Lady Londonderry. She was a veritable shorthand witch in her time and a 140-word-per-minute typist who didn't spend a lot of time backing up and whiting out, either.
With the way children in America are being educated, there is probably little point to this exercise, but until they start calling the language we speak "American," I'm going to plug away at the split infinitives, dangling participles, malapropisms and oral fartage. "But Dave," I hear some of you say, "there is no such word as 'fartage.'" Well now there is, friends, so read it and weep!
I'd be happy if I could just clear up a few of the most common mistakes I hear on telecasts. For example, the word irony is frequently used when describing that which is clearly coincidence. Here is how that little faux-pas could be fixed: "No, Bobby, the fact that they are tied for the lead, and went to the same high school, is not ironic. An example of irony would be if, in the middle of that last collection of un-connectable words, you had been flattened like an ant by a 500-pound dictionary. Let's go to sixteen."
Here's one I hear a lot in football, which I like to call "the superfluous what." Or, "Why use one word, when you can fit in seventeen?" "He ran that football about a yard shorter than what he needed." Beat my coin purse with a spoon, but there is no "what" required. I'm starting to pick up more mistakes in print ad copy and TV commercials, too. After Rocco's heroic struggle with the Golden Gimp at the U.S. Open, a hastily prepared TV commercial featuring a series of still photos and text was aired, with dribble that went something like: "No. 146 in the world took on No. 1 and captured all of America." Seriously, that's what it read! Capturing America would seem a bit of a stretch and I'm fairly sure it would be illegal to try (although to be fair, no one seems to have told Pat Robertson). Captivating Americans would have worked, or perhaps capturing America's attention, but help me out here — wasn't there a dilwad at some advertising house in charge of proofreading this crap?
Another of my favorites violates both English and mathematics: "And that gets him to within one of the lead." Uh, sorry Einstein, but anyone who is within one of the lead is by definition less than one behind, and since we don't deal in fractions on a scorecard, that would make him tied. A shot behind will do nicely, thank you.
I will admit that there are certain rules in the English language that border on the idiotic and are just too hard to keep. An example is the ancient taboo of ending a sentence with a preposition. Sir Winston Churchill hated the ridiculously over-wrought sentences this rule inflicted upon a listener, and would have none of it. Another less enlightened parliamentary gin-victim once accused him of ending a sentence with a preposition, to which he replied famously, "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put!"
Now that's the kind of shot that'll end a match quickly.
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