When I was learning the basics of writing the English language - that was in the 10th and 11th grade when I was in high school, but that was just after lint was invented - teachers try to get me to recognize clichés and then get me to try to avoid using them. Instead of saying that a child is as "cute as a button", they tried to make me think up something different to say. Just for the record, my teachers were not spending a lot of time trying to convince me to substitute more candid descriptions of people for "cute as a button"; I absolutely was not encouraged to describe one of my classmates as "something that should be lurking under a bridge somewhere".

One problem with the sports world is that coaches and athletes and writers and talking heads get mired in the world of "jockspeak" and thereby create new clichés. Some of them have really gotten out of hand and need to be given the verbal equivalent of euthanasia. If that is not possible, can't we at least figuratively send some of these to their rooms for a time out?

And now that I have mentioned the ever-so-trendy concept of a "time out", let me also observe that many clichés of the sports world are code words for things that might not be so pleasant to say in a direct manner. It is sort of like my "troll living under the bridge reference" above.

To make the situation even worse with many clichés in the sports world, lots of people come to believe they are actually pearls of wisdom and the phrases get little if any critical review. They sound good; they have some resonant emotional content; therefore, they must be critically important to some fundamental underpinning of the cosmos. If you think that is a syllogism that stands up to rational analysis, I can assure you that Aristotle is weeping somewhere at the great blackboard in the sky.

As an example, ask a football player or coach after a losing game or after losing several games in a row what the team needs to do in order to improve [Translation: win a game before the Himalayas are eroded into rolling hills] and you are most likely to get this or a small variant on it:

"We've got to just keep on doing what we are doing and eliminate the mistakes."

It's a good thing football players and coaches are not brain surgeons who live out their professional lives by this maxim or we would be butt-deep in people with the intellectual prowess and inquisitiveness of a typical eggplant. Albert Einstein once said that the real definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Obviously, Einstein is not someone who is considered worthy of study within the football world. To the people in that world, all one need do is just keep doing the same thing over and over and things will get better. No they won't!

Listen to a coach, player or talking head describe an athlete who is performing more competently than his/her previous achievements would have led you to believe he/she could perform. It won't take long before you hear that "Joe Flabeetz has taken his game to a new level." And others will sagely nod their heads in agreement. What the hell does that mean? Is Joe moonlighting as an elevator operator? What's wrong with saying, "Wow, that's something Joe Flabeetz has never been able to do before. Good for him - and therefore, good for the team."

When a player is injured, the natural question for the coach or team mouthpiece is, "When will he/she be ready to play again?" When surgery is involved, there is usually a time period given for the recovery and rehab processes that will give people some idea if Joe Flabeetz will make it back before the season is over. We have even become familiar with the general timeframe it takes to repair a "blown out knee" even if we had no idea where the tire that blew out was inside the structure of the knee. For less common surgeries, we would want to hear from a medical professional something like:

"Reattaching a totally severed leg is something that is very unusual and each case is different when it comes to the amount of rehabilitation that is needed. Now when you compound that uncertainty with the added complexity of this case where we had to reattach his severed head in addition to his leg, then it really isn't possible to know if he will live out the day let alone ever play some meaningless game again."

But for those minor injuries, the stock answer that we hear is: "He's day-to-day." Excuse me, I don't want to be too fatalistic about this, but aren't we all? Is this supposed to be a polite and obscure way of saying: "Beats the hell out of me and the training staff when this problem will be over and done with, but we'll get old' 'Beetzy back in the lineup as soon as we possibly can because we know that he is an important part of our team." When draft time rolls around - or if a trade has just been made - you can expect to hear that Joe Flabeetz has lots of "upside". Actually, that is simply a new cliché to replace the older one that he has lots of "potential". Excuse me but I think that there were a few folks who thought the Edsel had "upside". The same goes for Betamax, 8-track players and "New Coke". If it is draft day, the person bowing at the altar of "upside" means that they are taking a gamble because they did not have any better ideas when their time to pick rolled around. If "upside" comes up in discussing a trade it can mean that they would have done anything in the world to get rid of the player they just traded or it might mean that the player they just got was the best possible deal available. Just keep this mental image in mind when you hear about "upside": To get "up" you have to work to climb the hill. If the player were used to working hard, he would not have "upside" now; he would likely have "demonstrated proficiency" by now…

Listen to a talking head describing a game and a player in the game and you will surely hear that a player either has accomplished something by "staying within himself" - or possibly that in order for him to do better he needs to "stay within himself". Pardon me, but just what option does the player have other than to stay within himself? Until and unless we make astral projection and out-of-body transport into sporting events, athletes will indeed stay within themselves every time and in every place. No need to worry here.

Coaches come and go; it is one of the rhythms of the sporting world. But talking heads have to find ways to talk about these events in something other than the simple and basic truth: Coach Beaglebreath was fired because he did not get the job done that the team owners' expected and so they brought in a new guy, Coach Snaggletooth, to do better. That simple truth does not make it sound as if the talking head has any more insight than the guy sitting on the couch listening to him blabber away - and we can't have that can we? So you'll not wait too long to hear that Coach Snaggletooth has brought a new and aggressive and attacking defensive scheme with him from his previous work venue. If you think for just a minute, that would lead you to conclude that the recently departed Coach Beaglebreath may have been using a passive and cowardly system. I'll bet that the talking head never said that when Coach Beaglebreath was on the job whether or not the coach was in the room.

But I guess the one that gets me the most is one that rolls out every year as football teams are starting their training camps. As the pundits make the rounds of camps, they will always identify at least a few teams as the ones "who made a point of upgrading the roster in the off-season". Now think about that insightful revelation for just the briefest of moments. Other than the teams who are concerned only with getting players on the cheap and those teams that would not know a roster upgrade from an airline upgrade [Note: the Cincy Bengals hit the exacta here!] what team spends its off-season plotting ways to get worse? Am I supposed to believe that somewhere there is a GM losing sleep over how he can trade All-Star players for a one-legged place-kicker?

Falling back on clichés is a sign of mental laziness. That is what my high school English teachers told me over and over again. In the case of the sporting world that may indeed be the case - unless of course, there is another explanation that is even less flattering that a case of mental laziness. Suppose that some of the individuals mouthing and writing these morsels of drivel actually think that they are profound because they don't understand how shallow the clichés actually are. That would be a less than totally positive commentary on their intellectual capacity - not merely their willingness to exercise whatever limited capacity they may possess. That would put them in a category where it might be appropriate to say that they could be stumped by anything that had been made childproof, or that with the addition of just one more neuron, they could form a synapse.

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...

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