Following on from Ben Trawick-Smith’s post earlier in the week, freelance author and lexicographer Andrew Delahunty continues the discussion of the sublanguage of theatre.

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I’m a member of an amateur theatre group. Drama is, of course, all about language, the words of the play. But there is also a particular variety of language used by the people putting on a play, during rehearsals and backstage while a performance is actually taking place.

Many theatrical terms relate to direction, and I don’t mean the kind that a director gives. I’m talking up, down, right, left, that kind of direction.

‘We’re going up in a couple of minutes’ are words that make me nervous just writing them, never mind hearing them. They are the words whispered by the stage manager to tell the actors, probably murmuring their first few lines to make sure they are still in their head, that it is nearly time for the play to begin and for them to make their first entrance on stage.

When a show goes up, it starts. This comes from the idea of a curtain going up as a play begins. You could also say ‘an hour to curtain up’ or ‘curtain up at 7.30’. Even if a theatre doesn’t have a curtain (and ours doesn’t), you still talk about ‘going up’ or ‘curtain up’. In our theatre, the actors usually make their entrance by coming down a set of stairs from a landing by the dressing rooms. So, confusingly, if we’re going up in a couple of minutes, I’m actually about to go down.

Then there’s downstage and upstage. Downstage is the part of the stage towards the front, nearest to the audience. Upstage is the part of the stage towards the back, furthest from the audience. Stages used to be raked, that is they sloped upwards away from the audience. So the back of the stage was higher than the front. In theatrical parlance, if one actor upstages another, they move towards the back so that the other actor is forced to turn their back to the audience to address them while the upstage actor remains facing the audience. This led to the idea of an actor drawing the audience’s attention away from a fellow actor. In general usage, to upstage someone is to do something so that you get more attention than they do.

I used to get upstage and downstage mixed up. I think this was because I associated the idea of upstaging someone with standing in front of them (hogging the limelight, as it were). But on stage you upstage someone from behind them, not in front of them.

It has also taken me a while to get a grip on the terms stage right and stage left. Stage right is the right-hand side of the stage from the point of view of an actor facing the audience. Stage left is the left-hand side. Of course, when you are looking at the stage (as a member of the audience, or perhaps as the director during a rehearsal) stage right is the side of the stage on the left as you look at it.

There’s a similarity here, I think, with the use in sailing of the terms port, starboard, fore, and aft, to designate left, right, front, and back respectively. The reference point is the direction in which the boat or ship is pointing, just as in stagespeak it is the direction in which the stage is ‘pointing’ or facing. And, come to think of it, sailing and the stage do seem to share a good deal of their vocabulary and paraphernalia: wooden boards, large sheets of cloth being raised and lowered with ropes, rigs, crews … And, with that thought, I bring down the curtain.

Following Stan Carey’s introduction, sporting English month continues with a guest post by Andrew Delahunty, a freelance author and lexicographer. Among Andrew’s many books is Talking Balls: Getting to grips with the language of sport, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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It is difficult to explain what happened. It was a bad day at the office.

What is the speaker talking about, do you suppose? A stressful meeting? Poor sales figures? A broken photocopier? In fact, this is West Ham United’s manager Avram Grant commenting on his team’s 5-0 defeat by Newcastle United in January.

Sport may seem far removed from the day-to-day realities of office life: desktop computers, in trays, expenses claims, water coolers, commuting … And indeed you’d be hard-pressed to describe professional football, for instance, as a white-collar job, even if some team strips do happen to have one. So it always strikes me as slightly incongruous when a player or manager faces the cameras and microphones for a post-match interview and sums up a poor performance as a bad day at the office. The phrase is intended to suggest a matter-of-fact, no-excuses acknowledgment that an individual or team was below par (to borrow an idiom derived from golf), and has become something of a sporting cliché. And while a football manager in a suit using the expression is one thing, it can sound very odd, almost comical, coming from the mouth of a mud-spattered rugby player or a breathless sprinter.

In a similar vein (though perhaps more blue-collar than white-collar) is the expression put a shift in. When non-League Crawley Town narrowly lost to Manchester United in an FA Cup tie in February, Crawley’s captain Pablo Mills said that ‘the lads put a great shift in’.

And here’s ex-footballer Paul Merson, writing in the Daily Star newspaper:

If you are not playing well and not scoring goals, a lot of supporters will accept that. But when you are not putting a shift in, that’s when the supporters start to get on your case.

A player or team that ‘puts a shift in’ doesn’t stop running and shows an admirable level of commitment, physical effort, and stamina. Of course, shifts are usually associated with working in mines and factories, not sports pitches.

Rugby offers another contribution to the sport-as-a-job lexicon. A winger (a player who mainly plays down the side of the pitch) sometimes feels that he’s not seeing enough of the ball by the touchline and decides to move further into the centre of the pitch for a while in an effort to get more involved in the game. A player who does this is said to go looking for work, as in this recent assessment by Wales’s Shane Williams of England’s winger Chris Ashton:

Ashton has scored some nice tries and what’s good about him is that he is a player who goes looking for work.

And after a hard day’s work, there’s the journey home. Racing drivers make themselves sound like delayed commuters when they talk about being stuck in traffic or held up in traffic behind slow-moving cars at the back of the field:

I lost ground at the start as I had some problems warming up the tyres. After that I got held up in traffic, which made it very difficult to make any progress in the second half of the race.

Motor racing does at least involve cars. But the expression is also used in similar situations in other types of racing, such as athletics and horse racing. And in sports like rugby and American football a player with the ball runs into traffic when he finds himself in a crowded area of the pitch where a large number of opposing players are suddenly on hand to impede progress.

I think I’ll stop there. After all, credit to the lad, he’s put a real shift in.

England’s World Cup is over, following the team’s 4-1 defeat by Germany last Sunday. According to one online report of the match, ‘The first goal was a tribute to striker Miroslav Klose’s strength and poaching skills.’ Only a few days earlier, England fans had been celebrating a 1-0 victory over Slovenia. The scorer, with a sharply taken volley close to Slovenia’s goal, was Jermain Defoe, and ‘Defoe the poacher sends England through’ was the headline of one report.

Why ‘poaching’ and ‘poacher’? Well, in football-speak, a poacher (or goal poacher) is an opportunistic striker who specializes in scoring from close range, usually inside the penalty box. The term derives from the sense of poacher denoting a person who illegally catches or kills an animal, bird, or fish on someone else’s property. So a goal poacher is a striker who is thought of as sneakily ‘stealing’ goals from under the defenders’ noses.

You sometimes find a writer or commentator referring to a striker’s poacher’s instinct. Here’s a recent assessment of Spain’s David Villa in the Guardian newspaper:

Speed, lethal finishing and a poacher’s instinct have seen him bag a hatful of goals in the last couple of seasons.

Note also that word bag. One meaning of this verb is ‘to catch or kill an animal that you are hunting’, and the hunting image is sometimes extended with the phrase bag a brace. In general use this refers to the shooting of a pair of game birds, like grouse or pheasant, but in football parlance it means ‘to score two goals’:

Ronaldinho bagged a brace as Milan crushed Juventus 3-0.

There is a rich seam of metaphor for goal-scoring drawn from the vocabulary of hunting and theft. A striker can be described as a predator. On a good day he might plunder a hat-trick. Goal-scoring chances are taken, goals can netted as well as poached. Winners are snatched. To nick a goal is to score on the counter-attack, after a team has spent most of the game defending. Such a goal might result in a smash-and-grab. Literally this refers to a crime involving breaking the window of a car or shop in order to steal things quickly. In the context of a football match, though, the term describes a victory by one team (usually the away side) who have been completely dominated by their opponents for almost the entire game but have nevertheless managed to break out from defence just before the final whistle to score an unlikely and probably undeserved last-minute winner.

And what would be the response of the defeated team (and their fans) in these circumstances? ‘We were robbed’, of course.

June is not just about South African English. It’s a little bit about football too. In his guest post, Andrew Delahunty, a freelance author and lexicographer, discusses football lingo. Among Andrew’s many books is Talking Balls: Getting to grips with the language of sport published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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At last, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa has begun and the next few weeks will see the world’s best players in action: Messi, Ronaldo, Drogba, Rooney, Kaká … I’ve been relishing the build-up. Here’s a recent description of Brazil’s Kaká, predicted to be one of the players of the tournament:

Even when marked, the Brazilian has such clever feet that he can twist away from an opponent in a twinkling.

One aspect of football lingo that delights me – and there are many – is this curious habit football journalists and commentators have of ascribing human attributes to parts of the body. Kaká has clever feet. In other words, he can make them move with speed and guile and perform all sorts of trickery with them.

Having clever feet, however, should not be confused with having, say, an educated left foot. This approvingly suggests a high level of technical expertise and a thoughtful awareness of where to pass the ball. And then there is a cultured left foot (and it does seem to be left rather than right feet that tend to be so described):

Like Messi, Di María has fast feet, a cultured left foot, vision, and scores beautiful goals.

Despite conjuring up visions of a bunch of toes discussing the European novel and visiting the theatre, cultured here is intended, like educated, to convey a high degree of skill, but combined with such qualities as subtlety, discrimination, elegance, and unhurried finesse.

By the way, this linguistic oddity is not restricted to feet. You find the phrase despairing hands cropping up fairly regularly. They inevitably belong to a goalkeeper at full stretch and just failing to make a save:

He managed to curl the ball around the Belgian wall and past the despairing hands of Michel Preud’homme.

So, feet (plural) can be clever and a foot (singular) can be educated or cultured. Neither, though, can be described as intelligent. Unlike, surprisingly, a ball:

An intelligent ball lifted over the Austrian back line by Lampard nearly allows Crouch to hammer a volley goalwards.

Ball here means ‘pass’ or ‘cross’, and it is when the word is used in this sense that it acquires all sorts of unexpected modifiers that can baffle the uninitiated. An intelligent ball is a pass or cross that is precisely placed, showing great awareness of the movement of one’s teammates. Balls can also be described as dangerous, tempting, cunning, and ambitious. Then there is a killer ball, nothing ball, long ball, and (my personal favourite) the square ball. This is a pass laterally across the pitch, neither forwards nor backwards, but it never sounds to me as though it would roll very far.