Watching ESPN’s coverage of the England-Croatia European Cup football soccer match yesterday, I was struck by an on-screen graphic announcing, “If results hold, England advance.”  Jack Bell’s recent guest post on Not One-Off-Footballisms did not cover the grammatical Britishism of plural verbs for collective nouns, but to me it’s an even more significant development than announcers saying “boots” instead of “cleats” or “pitch” instead of “field.” After all, the announcers are Brits, but the graphic represents a corporate editorial decision by all-American ESPN.

Coincidentally, the National Basketball Association finals are currently being played between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Miami Heat–apparently the first time in U.S. major sports history that a championship is being contested by two teams whose names are not plural. (There’s a fun fact for you!) The outstanding public radio show “On the Media” last week had a segment about the dilemma faced by copy editors (that’s what we call subeditors) writing headlines: do they go singular (American) or plural (British?).

“On the Media” host Bob Garfield had an exchange with Tom Scocca, the editor of the online sports magazine Deadspin, that shows the surprising passion this issue can provoke. (Note: The OED defines poncy as “Affected, pretentious, self-consciously refined or superior; overly fancy or elaborate; effeminate, homosexual.”)

SCOCCA:  In Britain, there’s a longstanding habit of treating collective nouns, or these kind of mass nouns, as plurals. So in British English you would say, “The team are doing well,” and, therefore, in British English they don’t really care what they call their sports teams. And so, you have people say “Arsenal are the superior side in this match.”

GARFIELD:  But the problem is, as you observed, if you use the British convention, you sound like a poncy–

SCOCCA:  Rock critic, yeah. That’s a longstanding problem in writing or talking about rock music, because so many bands have these names that are singular to describe this collective unit that’s the band. And, you know, there’s a lot of Anglophilia in rock writing, and so there are people who will say things like, “Pavement are the most important band since Wire.”

GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] And how does that make you feel , when you run across – “Pavement are the greatest band since Wire?”

SCOCCA:  Despite the fact that I might agree with the sentiment, the skin crawls on the back of my neck.

GARFIELD:  And you basically want to find the critic and just  kind of slap him around, come on –

SCOCCA:  Yeah, give him a wedgie or something.

GARFIELD:  You’ve got some examples illustrating the issue.

SCOCCA:  Right. Sports Illustrated pretty consistently embraces the British usage, so their headline would be, “Heat Have Experienced Motivation to Win It All.”

GARFIELD:  Poncy.

SCOCCA:  Yeah, extremely. “Have another crumpet, Sports Illustrated.”

Funny story: in a previous post written under the influence of jetlag, I wrote “eff” instead of “egg.” Before I had a chance to correct it, reader John Stewart noted that effing–euphemism for fucking–is itself a Britishism.

This surprised me: I have gotten used to effing in these parts and had no sense of a transatlantic origin. But John is correct. The OED’s examples are all British, starting with this from Robert Graves’ 1929 “Goodbye to All That”: “He was charged with..using obscene language to the bandmaster; the bandmaster, who was squeamish, reported it as: ‘Sir, he called me a double effing c—.'”

I have a sense that effing’s U.S. popularity stemmed in large part from radio and later TV personalities seeking to avoid Federal Communication Commission strictures on foul language. A 2004 New York Times piece about shock jock Gregg “Opie” Hughes noted that even after moving to satellite radio (where the FCC has no sway), “Mr. Hughes often carefully and sometimes almost primly avoided expletives, using euphemisms like ‘freakin’ ‘ or ‘effing’ even though he was free to spew the foulest language they could come up with.”

A Google Ngram shows a 100 percent increase in U.S. usage of effing between 1998 and 2008

British usage is still about 50 percent more common, according to Google Ngram, but at this point, effing has passed its sell-by date on both sides of the Atlantic, with an unappealing naughty little child quality. Take a recent headline in Jezebel (which has used effing an astonishing 71 times in its history): “What’s the Big Effing Deal About Having a Second Baby?”

Nor does British actress Emily Blunt’s quote about her marriage to John Krasinski augur great things for the union: “All I can say is that it’s an effing blast.”

So why did the New York Times use this Britishism in its headline referencing Cash’s song?

I just got back from vacation (a beautiful tour of the Amalfi Coast) and I did the traditional vacation thing of reading a mystery novel, End in Tears, by the splendid (and English) Ruth Rendell. Three passages struck me as relevant to this blog. The first related to a recent entry on trousers. A character meets an old-fashioned woman and reflects on her garb: “The only name for her trousers, Hannah thought, was one her own mother used, ‘slacks.'” No mention of pants.

The second reminded me that I have been meaning to do an on-the-radar entry on flat, the dwelling unit that Americans have traditionally called apartment. In Rendell’s world, things are moving in the opposite direction, with the American term apparently a sign of pretension. A character refers to “these flats or ‘apartments,’ as the prospectus calls them.”

The final quote relates to the issue of the extent to which Britishisms are Americanized in American editions of books. Here’s a description of a bad guy:

He was sitting in front of the television on a sagging sofa eating a burger with a fried egg on top, a large portion of fries, and a thick slice of fried bread, the lot doused in tomato ketchup.

Surely Rendell wrote chips rather than fries? If so, on the very next page, the translator nodded, leaving unchanged a reference to “the coagulated egg, burger and chips on Prinsip’s plate.”

By JACK BELL

So there is this American television network  that is carrying all 31 games of the European Championship, the continent’s soccer jamboree that starts today in Poland and Ukraine.

On Wednesday, ESPN hosted a telephone conference call with the on air “talent,” as the industry calls its announcers. Both of the guys – Ian Darke and Steve MacManaman – are British. So that means another month of British accents spilling out of TV sets across America. Another month? Make that more, much more.

I love many, many things English: The Beatles, Stones and Clash; Beeston Castle; Mousehole in Cornwall; Stilton cheese; Manchester United; Cockney rhyming slang; and there once was this a girl (another story). But over the years, I’ve come to draw the line at the so-called “language of soccer,” where every chip is “cheeky,” every player on the wing is “nippy,” every field is a “pitch,” every pair of cleats are “boots,” every uniform a “kit” and every big play is “massive, just massive.”

I learned my soccer (sorry, we don’t call it football and even though the Brits like to give us stick for calling it soccer, it’s actually their word, derived from aSOCCiation football) from a collection of British counselors at a summer camp in the Pocono Mountains way back in the 1960s. We got called all kinds of names for wearing strange uniforms (not kits), high socks … you get the idea. But soccer taught me about the world, in a lot of different accents and languages. My travels have been soccer travels. My friends are soccer friends.

But now, as the game is seeping deeper and deeper into the American consciousness, some pooh-bahs somewhere (ESPN, Major League Soccer, Fox Soccer to name three) have come to the conclusion that to sound authentic the game in the United States has to, must to, adopt the Britlingo of the game.

And it’s especially absurd, in my view, for M.L.S. to indulge this soaring perversion. On its own Web site, MLSsoccer.com, the prose is rife with Britishisms that can confuse and mislead the casual reader, me included. Do you know what a “brace” is? I had never heard the word until a Fox Soccer report. Then it popped up again on the MLS Web site. I had to check the dictionary. And I’ve been following the game for longer than I care to remember. I had never, ever heard the term. Why confuse people? Can’t we just say “Francochino scored two goals”? Why make it mysterious.

What’s more the league – remember it’s called Major League SOCCER – has for some reason allowed a handful of teams to append the letters F.C. to their club names. That stands for Football Club. That’s fine if you’re in Burnley or Bristol (England, that is), but it’s patently absurd in the U.S. (maybe more acceptable in Canada for Toronto, a team without a nickname, imagine!, and the Vancouver Whitecaps). But F.C. Dallas? Seattle Sounders F.C. Laughable.

Fox Soccer has been the pre-eminent transgressor for a couple of reasons: The network’s lead soccer producer is a gruff (I’ve been told) Scotsman who insists on the Britlingo and some odd pronunciations of other words and names. Hence we have JuvenTOOS when every one in the world says Juventus. Just to be different? I think not. In addition, an anchor I once exchanged email with told me that the channel was catering to expat viewers who simply would not abide the Americanization of soccer lingo. Really? Next stop is the WC (water closet).

So there I am, watching Fox Soccer’s nightly report and on comes a story about something called a “tapping up” scandal. Sorry, but WTF? Again, I had never, ever heard the British term for a bribery scandal. Ever.  I also broke for the dictionary when another announcer used the word “scupper” to describe something gone wrong. So what’s a scupper? It’s a nautical term for the spaces on deck that allow water to flow back into the sea. Get it? Man overboard.

My latest pep peeve is ESPN’s wholesale plunge into Anglophilia (I know, that sounds really bad). Ian Darke has emerged as the network’s No. 1 play-by-play man. He’s as talkative as some of the worst American offenders, but what’s worse, he insists on using the most obscure British terms during broadcasts. Some players are at “sixs and sevens.” Huh? Wha? Are you kidding me. And the man simply will not allow the game to do its own talking.  Even the network’s M.L.S. broadcasts have a Brit doing the games (the generally benign Adrian Healey) and the newest entry in the national soccer TV landscape, NBC Sports Network, hired one Arlo White, another Brit. (Here I’ll give a pass to the former GolTV color man, Ray Hudson, who is most entertaining, in any language.) I don’t want to start a contROVersy, but it’s getting harder and harder to take.

These terms are not the language of soccer … they are the clichés of soccer and should be recognized for what they are. And they are spreading like Kardashians as more and more people latch on to the world’s sport and think they’re speaking the game’s lingua franca. They are not. Ask an authority as authoritative as the long-time columnist Paul Gardner, an English native who has called New York home for more than 40 years. The only Britishism he’ll use about this topic is “rubbish.” Brilliant, just brilliant.

As I mentioned before, there are many, many things I love about Britain, particularly the facility with the language of so many people. The inventiveness that is often missing in American discourse. But do we say “lorry” for truck? Do we say “loo” for bathroom? Do we say “lift” for elevator. Not bloody likely. We have our words, they have their words. Can’t we just agree to disagree on this? O.K., back to the games on the telly.

 Jack Bell is an editor in the sports department at The New York Times; and also edits and writes for the Times’s Goal blog. He can be reached at (no, not on) bell@nytimes.com. 

[I wrote this for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog]

All of a sudden, it is impossible to pick up the paper or listen to the news and escape “the long game.” I’m not talking about coverage of golf or other actual games, but to this sort of thing:

• The example of guitarist Doc Watson should “serve as inspiration to any musician interested in the long game, in making music that endures not because of its shock value or its keen marketplace vision but because within its measured tones lies universal truth.” Los Angeles Times, June 3.
• “I mean, [Queen Elizabeth] has played the long game better than anyone one can think of. I mean, she has understood from the beginning, for instance, even not to become too celebrated and popular.” Tina Brown, speaking on NPR’s Morning Edition, June 1.
• “[Lawrence] Summers’s talent was for influencing a particular decision at a particular moment. He was not someone with a flair for the long game—for the week-in, week-out slog of bringing colleagues around to his views.” Noam Scheiber, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery.
• “And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game.” Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 26.

Speaking of the Times, I charted the newspaper’s nonsporting “long game” uses and came up with this:

1892-2005, inclusive: 6

2006: 3

2007: 1

2008: 0

2009: 5

2010: 8 (including Barack Obama, at a December news conference on his tax plan: “To my Democratic friends, what I’d suggest is, let’s make sure that we understand this is a long game. This is not a short game.”)

2011: 8

Where did this expression come from? Why is it so popular? The second question is relatively easy to answer. It is a vivid metaphor for an idea that frequently comes up in consideration of politics, business, and other human endeavors: to wit, the possession and use of a long-term strategy. (The very phrase “long-term,” so flat and overplayed, suggests the need for a replacement.) It sounds British, always a good thing. And catchphrases, no less than videos or memes, have the capacity to go viral: to attain uncanny popularity at the drop of a dime.

But where did “the long game” come from? My investigation (admittedly not exhaustive) suggests that it is indeed of British origin. Certainly there are plentiful uses in such sources as The Economist, The Times (of London), and The Times Literary Supplement. The most common contexts have been diplomacy, espionage, and statecraft, as in a 1944 comment in The Times that “ … so well and successfully have conspirators played the long game.” But it’s been used in all sorts of ways. In 1917 an anonymous author in The TLS intriguingly commented, “We are reminded of a pregnant saying of Hart’s that the long game is the Church’s game.” A 2005 episode of the BBC series Dr. Who was titled “The Long Game,” as was a posthumous collection by the Australian poet Bruce Beaver published the same year.

Using Google Books as my Wayback Machine, I came upon this 1860 quote, in the journal The Athenaeum: “… to continue speculations, in the soundness or unsoundness of all who play  ‘the long game’ are interested.” The quotation marks around the phrase were a smoking gun, indicating recent coinage. And sure enough, when I went back just a little farther, I hit pay dirt in Bohn’s New Hand-book of Games, published in 1856. In the section on whist, the book notes, “In playing the long game, when both sides mark five, they are precisely in the same position with those parties who are beginning the short game.”

It turns out that the long game and the short game are variants of whist. Chamber’s Encyclopedia explains: “About 1785 the experiment of dividing the game into half was tried, and short whist was the result. The short game soon came into favour; and in 1864 the supremacy of short whist was acknowledged.”

Apparently, just as the long game was losing its popularity as a game, it came into its own as a metaphor. It took the Yanks a century and a half to catch up. Clearly we don’t like to rush into anything.

From in a review in today’s paper about a sitcom called “Men at Work”:

“The show give us four work mates … who are inexplicably kept on the payroll by a magazine called Full Steam even though they rarely seem to do any work.”