英语单词大师：American English Hits a Homer

 AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: with Major League Baseball's championship series delayed by rain -- no World Series game has ever been suspended before -- we thought we'd step up to the plate and reprise a segment from several years ago. We interviewed a linguist¹ at Berkeley about the many baseball-inspired terms in American English.

RS: But first, in case you're keeping score, the Philadelphia Phillies lead three games to one in their best-of-seven series against the Tampa Bay Rays. Game five is scheduled to resume Wednesday night.

AA: Baseball started in the eighteen hundreds, and Maggie Sokolik says writers made up colorful ways to describe the game. After all, in those days, there was no television to watch the national pastime.

RS: A lot of those phrases hit a home run with Americans, so today even people who don't follow baseball might still talk about doing something "right off the bat."MAGGIE SOKOLIK: "And if you can imagine a baseball striking the bat, that instant that things happen, things go very quickly, so if you need to do something fast, you might want to do it right off the bat. Similarly now if you have a large plan, say in business, in which you need to accomplish several tasks, you might tell your colleagues that you've 'touched all the bases,' you've contacted people -- you've 'covered your bases' as well, that is, you've prepared adequately."RS: Which means that you've probably gone beyond rough estimates, or "ballpark figures."MAGGIE SOKOLIK: "Often if we're talking, and perhaps we're negotiating, perhaps we might say, 'you know, we're not even in the same ballpark,' meaning my figures are so different from yours that we're not even communicating about them."AA: "Why a ballpark?"MAGGIE SOKOLIK: "Well, we have this notion of a ballpark as being a sort of rough area. The playing field doesn't really have a definite boundary. The diamond itself does, but what extends beyond the diamond doesn't have a specific dimension assigned to it. Similarly with time, an inning can be five minutes, an inning could be fifty minutes, it just depends on how long it takes to get all the outs in."AA: "And it's still if you get three strikes you're out."MAGGIE SOKOLIK: "Exactly."AA: "And it's not just in baseball anymore. We hear that now in laws. I know in California, if you commit three serious crimes ..."MAGGIE SOKOLIK: "Yes, three felonies and then I think it's a lifetime sentence after that. It 's call the 'three-strike law,' three strikes and you're in prison. I think a less happy baseball metaphor² than most of them are."RS: "Do you have a favorite baseball expression?"MAGGIE SOKOLIK: "I think the ones that I like, there's a lot of baseball expressions that really focus on people making mistakes, because errors in baseball are sort of what make the game interesting and exciting and also make us scream and tear our hair out in the stands. So when you talk about people being 'off base' -- or 'way off base' in fact -- that means that they're really quite wrong. There's also the term, to call someone a 'screwball' which is a type of pitch, but also means that someone is sort of crazy and not thinking straight. If we talk about someone who's really capable, we talk about them being 'on the ball.'"RS: "Do you see that our baseball vocabulary is evolving, especially since we are attracting athletes from outside the United States, from Central and South America, from Japan. Do you find that with these players coming to the United States, that they're also bringing a new vocabulary into baseball?"MAGGIE SOKOLIK: "Well, interestingly enough, not a lot, because the answer is that American baseball vocabulary has begun to travel overseas, so the language they bring with them is that which was exported to begin with."AA: As far as creating new terms, Maggie Sokolik at the University of California at Berkeley says American baseball is in a slump³. Still there are more baseball-related phrases out there than most people realize.

RS: In fact, University of Missouri Professor Gerald Cohen tells us the earliest citations⁴ for "jazz" had nothing to do with music. San Francisco newspaper writer "Scoop⁵" Gleeson used the term "jazz" in nineteen-thirteen to describe enthusiasm and spirit on the baseball field.

AA: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is [email protected]. And you can find all of our programs at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

1 linguist   

n.语言学家；精通数种外国语言者

参考例句：

• I used to be a linguist till I become a writer.过去我是个语言学家，后来成了作家。
• Professor Cui has a high reputation as a linguist.崔教授作为语言学家名声很高。

2 metaphor   

n.隐喻，暗喻

参考例句：

• Using metaphor,we say that computers have senses and a memory.打个比方，我们可以说计算机有感觉和记忆力。
• In poetry the rose is often a metaphor for love.玫瑰在诗中通常作为爱的象征。

3 slump   

n.暴跌，意气消沉，（土地）下沉；vi.猛然掉落，坍塌，大幅度下跌

参考例句：

• She is in a slump in her career.她处在事业的低谷。
• Economists are forecasting a slump.经济学家们预言将发生经济衰退。

4 citations   

n.引用( citation的名词复数 )；引证；引文；表扬

参考例句：

• The apt citations and poetic gems have adorned his speeches. 贴切的引语和珠玑般的诗句为他的演说词增添文采。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• Some dictionary writers use citations to show what words mean. 有些辞典的编纂者用引文作例证以解释词义。 来自辞典例句

5 scoop   

n.铲子，舀取，独家新闻；v.汲取，舀取，抢先登出

参考例句：

• In the morning he must get his boy to scoop it out.早上一定得叫佣人把它剜出来。
• Uh,one scoop of coffee and one scoop of chocolate for me.我要一勺咖啡的和一勺巧克力的。