‘What’s your English? 2011’ will be moving on this week, from sport to metaphor and figurative language. But – as many of our sports-related posts demonstrate – there’s a strong link between the two themes. Stan Carey’s piece this week celebrates the wonderfully original similes dreamed up by sports commentator Ray Hudson. Meanwhile, Andrew Delahunty has shown how people writing or talking about football will often enliven their descriptions by recycling expressions from the most diverse areas of life, such as hunting, anatomy, or working in an office. Going in the opposite direction, Stan has discussed the way that words used in sporting discourse are often used metaphorically in general English. Stan mentions baseball terms like curve ball and in the ballpark. There are plenty of others, too (getting to first base, step up to the plate, and take a rain check come to mind), all of which British speakers know and use – even though few Brits know much about baseball.

Why some sports contribute more metaphors to the language than others is an interesting question. My own favourite sport is cricket (don’t all yawn at once) and it is a fact that British English has taken more idioms from cricket than from any other sport. If a politician faces hostile questioning, for example, we might say that the interviewer has put him or her on the back foot by bowling a googly (roughly equivalent, metaphorically speaking, to throwing someone a curve ball). The poor politician might then be said to be on a sticky wicket (in a difficult position) or to be stumped (unable to think of an answer or explanation). These are all expressions that originate from the language of cricket, as does the idea of doing something off your own bat. Even the hat trick (whether it’s three goals in football, or any sequence of three successes – like ‘a hat trick of number one albums’) was a cricketing term before it became part of the general language.

Yet, even in the English-speaking world, cricket is a minority sport. (The exception is the Indian subcontinent, where it is more like a religion.) So why has cricket given rise to so many metaphors, when relatively few come from football (aka soccer), the world’s most popular game? The explanation may have something to do with class (another theme we’ll be tackling, later this year, as part of ‘What’s your English?’). There’s a saying attributed to the Duke of Wellington that ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’. The reference (if Wellington ever really said this) would have been to the cricket fields of this elite school, where, it was believed, England’s ruling classes learned the values and ‘character’ which enabled them to run their empire. The connection is made even more explicitly in an imperialistic 19th century poem by Henry Newbolt, which alternates between the tense final moments of a cricket match, and a desperate battle in the desert. Cricket was at that time very much the preserve of the British upper classes, and even in our more egalitarian times, its influence on the language endures.

Which is the more difficult word: take or encephalomyelitis? Most people would pick the second one – but a lexicographer wouldn’t. For dictionary-writers, words like encephalomyelitis are easy because they only have one meaning, and it can be defined with complete accuracy. The really difficult words are go, take, get, and similar high-frequency items which have dozens of meanings and appear in dozens of phrases. Encephalomyelitis is an example of terminology (what we called ‘sublanguages’ in the first blog of this series). Whatever your professional, academic or recreational interests – from astronomy to zoology – there will be a whole sublanguage that means a great deal to you, and very little to anyone else. Unless you’re in the relevant field, encephalomyelitis is what Donald Rumsfeld would call a ‘known unknown’: you don’t know what it means – but you know that you don’t know it (and you know that you probably don’t need to know it).

The problem arises when a word belonging to a sublanguage doesn’t look like terminology. Most terms used in tennis, for example, are common English words used in specialized ways: break, serve, set – even love. Similarly, grammarians talk about moods, aspects, and cases. This is an important fact about sublanguages: the words don’t always look ‘technical’. It’s the same with cricket. There is plenty of ‘obvious’ terminology: the googly, zooter and yorker, for example, are words for describing different ways of bowling the ball at the batsman. But what about a sentence like this:

Flintoff is on strike, and Ponting has set an attacking field, with two short legs, a silly point, and a man out on the pull at deep third man.

There isn’t a single ‘difficult’ word here, yet the sentence is meaningless if you don’t know the special cricketing uses of almost every word. Take the first phrase here: on strike. Usually this refers to people refusing to work as a form of protest. But in cricket terms, it tells you which batsman is currently being bowled at. (If you know about baseball, it’s like being at bat). Meanwhile, the other team is ‘fielding’ – trying to get their opponents ‘out’ – and a field (which is ‘set’ by the captain) is the particular pattern in which the fielders are arranged around the playing area. An elaborate system of terms allows us to pinpoint an exact spot on a field of several hectares. If a position is described as silly, for example (as in ‘silly point’), it means it is very close to the batsman (it’s a silly place to stand because you risk being hit by the ball when the batsman whacks it).

The cricketer on the right is standing at 'silly mid-off'.

If you are fairly close to the batsman, but not close enough to be ‘silly’, your position is described as short (a ‘short leg’ is on the batsman’s left side). And so it goes on – using common English words for highly specialized purposes.

Finally, there’s a nice connection between love in tennis, and its equivalent in cricket: a batsman who fails to score any runs is said to be out for a duck. This comes from the expression ‘a duck’s egg’, whose shape resembles a zero. And tennis has its ‘egg’ too: the term love comes from the French ‘l’oeuf’. Next time, we’ll look at the various mechanisms by which a word, starting with one basic meaning, can gradually acquire additional senses like the ones we’ve discussed here.

Cricket is the most quintessentially English game, but is famously incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been brought up with it. (The phrase in the title here makes perfect sense to an aficionado of the game but could easily be misinterpreted by anyone else.) George W. Bush – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – thought cricket “looks a bit like polo and baseball combined, only without the horses”. Hmmm … not quite, George.

One of the things that puts people off cricket is its apparently unfathomable vocabulary. But the language of cricket is just one of thousands of “sublanguages” in English, and like most aspects of language it has its own logic. Once you have cracked the system, it all becomes much clearer … and anyone learning any language will find it much easier if they understand some underlying “rules” about how language works.

So the idea here is not to indoctrinate readers into the language of cricket, but to use this as a medium to explore how language functions at a more general level. Cricketspeak is a microcosm of the English language, and of language per se. Think of a language as consisting of, first, a central core – the common vocabulary we need for any and every form of written or spoken communication – then, an infinite number of sublanguages, such as the terminology used by beekeepers, oncologists, online gamers, or language-teachers. Sublanguages tend to embody most of the features of a language system, so by learning about one particular sublanguage you can actually learn a lot about language in general.

That’s the premise behind this short series of blogs, which will show how most linguistic concepts can be explained and illustrated through the language of cricket. Future blogs in the series will look at concepts such as:

• word-formation: for example, how we often take English nouns and turn them into verbs (have you Facebooked anyone recently?)
• figurative language: metaphor, metonymy and similar processes are pervasive in all languages – and they have a key role in the way we attach meanings to words. These concepts can all be illustrated through the vocabulary of cricket.
• terminology: every sublanguage has its distinct terminology, and cricket – with terms like googly, yorker and doosra – is no exception.
• polysemy: how common words develop new and often specialised meanings: when we say a cricketer is on strike this has nothing to do with refusing to work, as we’ll see later. Most of cricket’s vocabulary is based not on obscure terms, but on very ordinary words (like the ones in the title above) that have taken on new meanings. Rabbit, duck, and lobster, for example, all have special meanings for cricket fans.
• gender, class and other sociolinguistic issues: like any other activity, cricket is played in a changing world, and its language reflects these changes.
• regional variation: how the same concept can have different names depending on where you are. Cricket started in England (well, probably – more on that in the next posting) but has spread to many parts of the world, and different speech communities have their own take on the language. There’s an incident in the movie Slumdog Millionaire where the kids are chased off a patch of private land where they’re playing cricket: the game’s epicentre is no longer the UK, but India – and this has implications for the language too.
• wordplay: this is a feature of language worldwide, and cricketspeak has plenty of examples.
• language change: everywhere in the language, older words fall out of use and new ones come along – but what are the mechanisms by which these things happen? Exploring obsolescence and neologism in cricket will help to reveal the rules behind these processes.

These are some of the topics we’ll look at in coming blogs. The principle behind all this is a belief that language is almost never random: the way it works and the way it develops tends to be governed by systems – some of which are mentioned above. These systems aren’t always easy to pick out among the idiosyncrasies of real communication, but they’re always lurking in the background. The more we understand about them, the better equipped we’ll be to teach, learn, and use languages – and cricket is as good a medium as any for this kind of exploration. Watch this space.

Read part 2 (origins) here and part 3 (terminology) here.