Initial that

Abbreviations are running rampant -- but not in sports

A lovely thing about sports is that it's one of the few refuges left which is basically free from everythingassociated with it being initialized. Sports terms have often been vivid, and we're blessed that most of them have not been abbreviated into initials or acronyms, as is the case with so much of the sustained defilement of our language.

Oh, sure we use initials to refer to the NFL or the IOC, but we can accept that because those are organizations, and all organizations just go by initials these days. Once there was the League of Nations, now it's the U.N. Once we had the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, now we have NATO. So, we can live with the PGA and the AL East. I mean, after all, we even have a president who is just known as W now, and worst of all, we have this vulgar habit of saying that's the F-word and that's the C-word and that's the S-word. If Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets right now, he would quote the Lord as saying this for the seventh commandment: "Thou shalt not commit the A-word."

Why did we have to start abandoning a beautiful language and using all these initials? Chaucer didn't. Shakespeare didn't. Dickens didn't. And an even larger question: Why is sport perhaps the last glorious holdout from this god-awful letter lingo? Thank heaven, we don't say, "Kobe Bryant made a three p-t f-g." We still say, "Kobe Bryant made a 3-point field goal." Or we say, he "made a trey," which is a prior existing word, cleverly applied anew. People have always criticized sport for its cliches, but it's a fine how-do-you-do that sports now debases the language less than the rest of this TV, DVD, CBS, NPR, CEO, VP, FDIC, PG e-mail world.

In fact, sports may even be getting better. I don't think we say TD for touchdown nearly as much as we used to. Sadly, though, you do hear a few more QBs now instead of quarterbacks. Please, let's DQ that or put it on the DH, PDQ. Of course, KO and TKO have long been part of the lexicon. ERA is so common it's always in the crossword puzzles. But in one of the great circular developments in the war against initials, runs batted in was long ago initialized to RBIs, but then RBIs became "ribbies," which is good honest Mercan vernacular like "maxi" or "mini" or "deli." "Ribbi."

Oh sure, abbreviations are used in agate type of the sports pages. You can't be a basketball fan, for instance, without knowing how to read FG-FGA, FT-FTA, O-T, A, PF, PTS -- but that doesn't mean basketball fans have to talk that way. And they don't. Sports people treat the English language with more respect -- and more cleverly -- than people in politics and medicine and business. Sports people still speak in syllables, and not just in upper-case letters, and that is something to be grateful for.

That, and we no longer have to hear anybody say Y2K. Thank the G-word for that.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, The Other Adonis (Sourcebooks Landmark), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.

 

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