It is not so much an expression as a formulation: one appealing to the collective “you”. “If you give up two goals early in the game, you’re going to be in trouble. “You can’t escape the lead three times and expect to win.” “You understand where we are going with this. It’s an obvious borrowing from English, which doesn’t have the indefinite pronoun “on” to fall back on like in French. In an ideal world, for our articles, we turn “you” into “we”. “You can’t escape the lead three times and expect to win. It’s much more harmonious, although we can’t do it systematically – we don’t want to change the essence of the interlocutor’s words either. But speaking of expressions, my two favorites with the use of “you”: “If your name is…” and “you owe…”. Ideally used together: “If your name is Nick Suzuki, you should shoot more often for the net.” “You can’t not like that.
The sports vocabulary is polluted by layers of English. Some, like “hard to play against”, are obvious enough not to be picked up elsewhere. But “work ethic”, a somewhat too direct translation of work ethic, circulates abundantly without anyone being able to explain why. Our friends at Antidote define ethics as “the set of rules of conduct specific to a society, to a group”, and also as a “branch of philosophy which studies the foundations of mores and morals”. Anyway, nothing here that describes the hours Sidney Crosby spends in the weight room in his summer training. Our co-workers at review suggest “good work habits”; at our friends at Radio-Canada (we have friends everywhere, it’s better than having enemies), we are offered “discipline, hard work”. There are several options to avoid copying English.
There would be a thousand of them, but the expression “grand finale” particularly annoys me. The Avalanche and the Lightning met in the Stanley Cup “final” last year, not in the “grand final”, because there is only one final for the first prize. The name “finale” should suffice to remind us of the heroic nature of this achievement without adding superlatives. There is obviously, in some cases, a match for the bronze medal or a consolation final, a final for third place or even at the limit a small final. But thank you for cleaning up “final”. Period.
What is fabulous with the world of sport, among others, is that you can unearth obvious pearls of philosophy there. For example, a player who gets a “nasty flu” inevitably falls in battle, because no one has ever caught a nice flu. In this way, there is the concept of the match that would be “one-nighted”. From memory, wasn’t it Horace who had spoken about the importance of savoring the present day without worrying about tomorrow, or something like that? But your favorite players don’t eat that bread. Thus, one must “give it all”, “leave it all on the ice” (or on the field), as if each match were the last. Which leads us to tomorrows that sing, or not, because if they don’t exist, they can’t sing. In this reality, a cruel defeat, for example in a seventh game, would amount to a kind of sporting apocalypse, because there would be nothing afterwards. Which is not true, as we know, because “preparing for the next game” is paramount. And how can there be a next game if there is no tomorrow? We ask you.
I know that within my close guard, the expression “vice-champion” to designate an athlete who finishes on the second step of the podium gives hives. However, personally, it’s the phrase “one shot without warning” that wins the day. I understand that this expression should not be taken literally and that the player quickly fired his shot. But if there are shots without warning, then there are shots with warning. And that notion makes me laugh every time. I figure one day Cole Caufield is going to scream before he takes a good slap shot and the commentator can finally say, “Caufield’s warning shot surprises the keeper.” ” My dream.
I did not choose an expression as such, but rather a way of naming. In written or spoken sports jargon, one thing has been bugging me, and has been for quite a while, but even more so during the last Tokyo Olympics. For several weeks, there was talk of “the Canadian women’s soccer team gold medal”. However, it is rather “the Canadian women’s soccer team”. Because in itself, the team is gendered, it is either feminine or masculine. Sport is gender neutral. There is no women’s soccer or men’s soccer. Soccer is soccer! Same thing in hockey, where “women’s hockey” is widely used, while what varies is the gender of the team, not the hockey.
I have developed over time several visceral hatreds of certain expressions. I hate with an unhealthy passion present participles or conjunctions following commas, for example. But nothing makes my body shiver more than “vibrating the strings” or any variation of the use of the word “stringing”, or “flickering the red light”. In fact, I hate every expression used 10,000 times to express an action that is easy to express in another way. In short, you have to force yourself a little. I know my insistence causes some to end up with blank page syndrome trying to come up with a new way to say the same thing, but ultimately the texts are more fun to read. For me and for you.
And you, what expression used in sports coverage irritates you the most and why?