Team GB may struggle to gold or even podium but we can still lead the world in lexiconing new jargon
It has been all bubbling exuberance at the World Athletics Championships in Daegu. Records have been broken, races have been dedicated, dreams have been dreamed, starts have been falsed and nouns have been verbed. In the last case we should expect nothing less. Track and field leads the world in the important business of converting lumpy, dull old "naming words" into dynamic and vibrant "doing words" (a contrast with football, which has brought us nothing recently but the sullenly passive "an assist"). Vocab-wise, medalling and PB-ing are now totally part-and-parcelled, and most experts in South Korea believe podiumed, finalled and all-comered are not far off lexiconing.
Traditionalists have naturally furore-ed over the new jargon, regarding it as the most serious sporting assault on the mother tongue since the retirement of Colin Murphy, the former Lincoln City manager whose Sincil Bank programme notes were the Finnegans Wake of football ("You, me, we all of us," Murphy once wrote while in the grip of Imp-inspired frustration, "have been forced to breakfast on travesty, lunch on objection and insult, dine on inflated pressure. High tea we don't sit still long enough to take and by supper we were still expected to be victorious.")
Despite the pedants' protests, many sports' elite performance directors feel even more needs to be done linguistically if Team GB is to potential in 2012. Some have even called on David Cameron to initiative as soon as possible to get noun-emissions three-quartered in the next six months. "The London Olympics needs to legacy, not just physically but also verbally," the Locog chairman Lord Coed earlier this week at a party to celebrate the news that Stone, Island, Scallies have been named as the official corporate freebie ticket reallocation street corner redistribution specialists of the Games.
With record levels of obesity leading to fears that upwards of 63% of Britain may soon be trapped on the wrong side of doorways blocked by the remaining 37%, something clearly must be done. If Britain is broken, that can only be the result of one of our citizens sitting on it. A successful Team GB will help address that problem, for it is surely no coincidence that the fireworks that proclaimed the coming celebration of the announcement of the lead-in to the countdown to next summer's Olympiad inspired thousands of folk of all the many girths of multi-gutted Britain to crowbar the doors off the Arndale Centre and help themselves to running shoes and tracky bottoms.
Whether a fresh, dynamic and moderned English language is the best way to ensure Team GB medal-tables above Australia, however, is being questioned by those who point to the increasing influence of lawyers in top-level sport. In Daegu this week the Chinese golded in the 110 metres hurdles not by running the fastest, but by pointing out that the man who finished first, Dayron Robles of Cuba, had spent a section of the race tugging on their athlete Liu Xiang's arm like a toddler trying to direct a parent's attention to a lofty display of Kinder eggs. That kind of attention to the letter of the law and quickfire finger pointing is very much part of the modern Olympics, say those who would like to see UK sport directing more of taxpayers' money towards the legal profession than to skinny kids who can jump over poles backwards.
As has so often been the case in the past, Britain more or less invented law as a sport, only to fall away once every one else took it up. Who, for instance, could forget that glorious time in Athens eight years ago when as Britain's hardworking Olympic legal beagles battled to get the German three-day eventers disqualified by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in order to earn the UK men and women a well-deserved equestrian gold? At the time it seemed this triumph would inspire a generation of British kids to get involved in the cool and spectacular world of pernickety objection-hurling, with none other than Clare Balding claiming that "technical rule-chiselling is even more thrilling than mixed doubles badminton featuring Britain's dynamic duo of Robertson and Emms".
Inspired, the prime minister, Tony Blair, promised to fund the building of hundreds more all-weather courts across country "so that more and more ordinary people can get involved in this modern and innovative new game of complaining that the foreigners have cheated". Alas, Mr Blair was soon distracted by the need to bring peace to the Middle East by blowing it up, and so that initial promise has withered to a point where Scottish football is unlikely even to wheedle a club through to the next round in European competition, despite Turkish clubs being turfed out over match fixing and the Swiss fielding illegal players.
It is a poor state of affairs, especially since disqualification blue-ribanded in South Korea this week. As Darren Campbell observed, "Do you think the man in the pub would be talking about Bolt winning in, say, 9.80 seconds? No. But everyone's talking about this drama." The news that the men's 100m final in Daegu had saloon-barred will surely not have been lost on the IAAF. By next summer I believe we will find the Games is very much an event in which the emphasis is not on winning, but on not taking part.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/sep/01/sport-language-harry-pearson
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