Category Archives: Sport

The OED has two definitions for “own goal.” The first is, in reference to “sport,” is “A goal scored against the scorer’s own team, usually unintentionally.” The dictionary cites a use of the term in 1922 but the next one isn’t till the Sunday Pictorial‘s use in 1947, the quotation marks around the phrase suggesting it hadn’t yet entered public parlance: “An amazing ‘own goal’ by Wilf Mannion.” The OED has a 1998 quote from the Miami Herald in reference to hockey, and I would judge that in recent years the term is commonly used by Americans discussing that sport and what we still call “soccer.”

The second definition is: “fig[urative]. (orig. and chiefly Brit.). An act that unintentionally harms one’s own interests.” The first citation is from the The Economist in 1975: “The doyen of the Tribune group..scored an own goal on Wednesday night… His speech at a packed Tribune rally was a gross tactical miscalculation of [etc.].”

All the citations are British, but figurative “own goal” has definitely arrived in the United States. The term’s growth may have been spurred by a 2010 article in Harper’s that got a lot of attention: “Own Goal: How Homeless Soccer Explains the World.” In any case, it’s now very much out and about. In an article that will be published in the New York Times Magazine on December 23, but that has already been posted online, Jason Zengerle writes that Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings

batted back Republicans’ most incendiary charges against Obama by pointing to the lack of any real evidence, and repeatedly provoked [Republican Congressman Darrell] Issa into own goals, like the time Issa received negative coverage for ordering Cummings’s microphone cut off when Cummings tried to make a statement at the end of a hearing.

I wrote here, and again here, about Americans’ use of the typically BrE “sport,” rather than the traditionally American “sports.” I’ve continued to see a lot of examples, most recently from tennis star Venus Williams yesterday at the Australian Open:

I think why people love sport so much is because you see everything in a line. In that moment, there is no do-over. There’s no retake. There is no voice-over. It’s triumph and  disaster witnessed in real time. This is why people live and die for sport, because you can’t fake it.

At this point, AmE “sport” seems sufficiently widespread not to warrant further comment.

I spied a relatively subtle addition to the list of British football expressions taken up by American soccer participants in a quote in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. The American-born manager (actually, that’s another one–American lingo would be “coach”) of the Philadelphia Union, after a loss, said: “Credit to Dallas because they outplayed us from that point on.”

The more common British sports cliche (and correct me if I’m wrong) would be “Full credit to…” But they both differ from typical American coach-speak in this situation, which is,  “Give them credit.”

I told you it was subtle.

My heart quickened when I saw this article on the website Bleacher Report:

The reason is that my friend David Friedman, an (American) West Ham supporter, periodically tells me about terms specific to English football, and one of them is pace, referring to the fleetness of a player. Americans, of course, use speed. The Bleacher Report story on the NBA (National Basketball Association) seemed like proof that the word had crossed over.

Was it Hamlet who said, “I know not ‘seems'”? In any case, it turned out the Americanization of pace was an illusion. The Bleacher report piece went on:

That is, the writer was talking about a team’s pace of play, not an individual’s foot speed. Never mind.

I’ve written before about the increasing U.S. use of sport rather than the traditional sports. National Public Radio’s  Frank Deford tends to alternate the two in his weekly commentaries. But this headline from today’s New York Times would appear to herald a new level of acceptance for the singular form.

Robert Siegel, the redoubtable National Public Radio host, took to the airwaves yesterday to denounce nil. Or, rather, to denounce “nil” and its

creeping penetration of American English thanks to the World Cup. Nil is a contracted scrap of Latin that survives in a few common bits of American English. We might say the chances of something happening are next to nil. Headline writers always in need of very short words sometimes use nil. But if I said, in the top of the third inning, the Nationals led the Cubs one-nil and then Chicago scored an equalizer the late Harry Carey and Phil Rizzuto [both baseball announcers] would both shout, “Holy cow!” in their graves.

As readers of this blog know, the “creeping penetration” of British soccer terminology is a rich subject, covered most recently here. On the “nil” question, Siegel, to his credit, didn’t just fulminate but brought in an expert, Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for the Oxford University Press. She added some historical perspective:

…in the beginning of the 20th century the way that Americans talked about soccer was not that different from the way that British people talked about soccer. And they used nil sometimes to describe a score. But we lost the knack for talking professionally about soccer during soccer’s decline over the course the 20th century and now I think that our journalists are picking it up on the fly. And there’s an uncertainty about where does British-English end and soccer terminology begin. Most people wouldn’t think it was odd, I think, to say extra time rather than overtime. That’s just how you talk about soccer.

Siegel’s other guest, an announcer for a Major League Soccer team, would have none of this. “I don’t use the term nil,” he said, “because when I say I’m going to the men’s room I don’t say I’m going to the loo.”