Editorial
Baseball slang has long been the wonder of those who see American papers but
are not familiar with the game, and though its position is too strong to need a defender it has found one in the Providence “Journal.” Some mild-mannered people have been asking for reports in plain English, and actually prefer “both teams played marvellously well” to “both teams uncorked the ginger bottle at the get away, and danced through the whole performance for the snappiest work of the season.”
Perhaps it would be possible to get something between the two, and while we may sympathise with the baseball enthusiasts who do not wish the reports to “read like one of Henry James’s short stories,” we may yet remark that Mr James’s writing is never colourless, though it has not the peculiar brilliances that make good sporting “copy.”
We are ready to back good, terse, pungent English even against such diction as “the little Centerdale lad toed the plate with two in the fifth, bumped a bender on the trade-mark, and zipped it to the fence for a triple.” There is a great deal of charm about this at a first reading, but we could not do with much of it; such a style does not age well. But it is in demand, and it has the remarkable merit of being untranslatable.
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The case is cited of a New York German paper which would not have a word of English in its columns till it was compelled to give the baseball reports in their unapproachable idiom. It is suggested that baseball was thus a compelling force in spreading the English language, and certainly even these writers of a technical jargon cannot get on without a few prepositions or conjunctions which may form the thin end of the wedge. And, as the champion of the baseball writers says, “My dear old college professor was always strong for vividness and conciseness.”
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