The World of Sports Is a Perfect Arena for a Mouthwash

In the spirit of spring cleaning, a state college in Michigan works up an annual list of words and phrases recommended for banishment from the language.

I read about this in Jack Smith’s column in View. The school’s banishment committee puts the kiss of death on words or phrases misused or overused. Or, as we might say in the sports world, words that are misused wrongly or overused too often.

The committee overlooked sports, a fertile field of linguistic manure. So roll in the dumpster, boys. The envelopes, please.

Transition game has to go. Why not give the up-tempo style of basketball a catchy name, like fast break, or running game ?

The dictionary says transition is “changing from one state, form, activity, or place to another.” Running from one end of the court might qualify as transition, but barely. It’s like my wife asking me, “Honey, will you transition down to the store and pick up some milk?”

Transition is too grand a word for basketball, unless a team actually changes its molecular structure, something only Michael Jordan has been able to do. Or if the team, during the course of a fast break, completes a major trade.

Please, players and media, no more talking about how a team can control its own destiny. Again, my trusty dictionary tells me that destiny is predetermined or inevitable. If you can control your own destiny, it’s not your destiny.

Road trip is a phrase reeking of redundancy, but we should keep it, even though there’s no such thing as a home trip . Trip , used alone, has the connotation of a fun-type vacation, an unfortunate fall, or an experience with LSD. A road trip can incorporate all those elements, of course, but I think we need to differentiate.

Foot speed is fast gaining in popularity, because broadcasters and coaches like to sound erudite, showing off their brain speed. It is my observation that an athlete’s foot speed is invariably identical to his knee speed or his nose speed , and that the speeds of various body parts can be neatly lumped under the umbrella term speed . If a guy has great foot speed but poor upper-body speed, he’s going to fall over backward a lot.

Players and teams today like to stay within their comfort zone . I don’t know what this means. Is it a hammock? Comfort zone is an example of psychobabble, unless it refers to an actual roped-off area where no pesky autograph-seekers or reporters are allowed.

Personally, I myself subscribe to the theory of John Donne, that no man is a comfort zone. In the same vain vein, players today frequently tell you, I try to play within myself . The hard part, I would guess, is swallowing the ball.

Hand-eye coordination is a legit term, but if an athlete has plain old coordination, it’s likely that this attribute will encompass his eyes and hands. Maybe we need to expand the concept. An outfielder who is off and running at the crack of the bat, for example, has great foot-ear coordination .

And we could say Mike Tyson has great hand-eye coordination if we’re referring to Mike’s hand and his opponent’s eye.

An oft-used redundancy is successful surgery . Too wordy. After all, what does successful surgery mean? It means the patient lived. To paraphrase Patrick Henry, call it surgery , or call it death .

This one will die hard: velocity. Players and announcers love the world because it has four syllables. It is used to describe a pitcher’s fastball, or velocityball . Velocity should be used only when referring to a velocipede, which is an early bicycle propelled by the rider pushing his feet along the ground. Velocipeders, by the way, developed great foot speed.

As a sportswriter, maybe I’m oversensitive to this one, but can we please junk the phrase blown out of proportion ? It is used by athletes and coaches to describe the central angle of any story they don’t like, ie: “That story about me hijacking the jumbo jet full of orphans was blown out of proportion.”

I prefer to think of such story angles as being blown into proportion.

Another puzzling sportism, used mostly in baseball, is the phrase: What goes around, comes around . Apparently this is a principal of quantum physics discovered either by Einstein or by Fred the merry-go-round operator. It is used by a player who has just been dusted off at the plate or gouged by a spikes-high baserunner, and it is uttered as a wish of bad karma upon the perpetrator. I prefer the old-fashioned he’ll get his .

Please, coaches and players, no more reference to a football opponent as a physical football team. This is like referring to a collegiate chess team as a cerebral chess team. Tell us a football team is cerebral , or metaphysical , or horticultural , but let’s not get physical.

That’s it for now. There are probably lots of phrases I’m forgetting, but all I can do is go out and give it 110%.