I hate to trespass on the New Yorker‘s territory, but I can’t resist passing along the headline to this story [by Steven Wine for the Associated Press] from the Berkshire Eagle:
Few saw rookie weave mound gem
(In case the story gets taken offline or that fastsearch link doesn’t work, the story is about a young Florida Marlins pitcher who threw a no-hitter—the first in the major leagues for two and a half years—before a few thousand people, Florida having pretty much given up on their underachieving team. Oh, and for those who don’t know from baseball: “mound” refers to the pitcher’s mound, the slight elevation from which the pitcher throws the ball to the batter, sixty feet and six inches away. As to how you’re supposed to weave a gem, you’re on your own with that. Ask the headline writer.)
Also, am I alone in thinking that ‘mound gem’ is a really unappealing collocation?
Perhaps you could weave a gem with glass fibre.
A quick search on google shows that “weave a gem” seems to be fairly rare and used almost exclusively in connection with baseball – specifically for pitchers throwing a great game. To describe a great pitching peformance as “Throwing a gem” is very common (and makes more sense). “To weave magic” is also a common sports cliche to describe pitching performance. My guess is that a few sportswriters have decided these cliches could be combined.
“Weave mound gem” is also a fairly awkward sequences of words. The rhythm of three stressed syllables with no unstressed ones grates on my ears a little.
Mixed metaphors are a pernicious disease among the baseball commentariat. At the beginning of the first Yankee home game this season (broadcast on the YES Network in New York), announcer Michael Kay referred to the game as “another thread in the fabric of the cathedral that is Yankee Stadium.” (This wasn’t some off-the-cuff comment but was part of the prepared intro to the game — heck, he was probably crafting that sentence all through spring training.) So if a pitcher can weave a gem, why not a cathedral made of threads?
I’m surprised at the literary conservatism on display here. Have you never read late Shakespeare with its extraordinary density of metaphor? Surely this is the direction the Bard himself would have heading had his planned comeback not been cut short by a dodgy pint in a Warwickshire hostelry. Writing like this has made my day come true and I take off my heart from the bottom of my hat.
“have been heading”, of course.
I’m reminded of a hard-to-parse headline I saw once: “Judge rules abuse records confidential.” There’s only one word in that that couldn’t be a verb.
Off-topic, to be sure, but Florida is hardly an underachieving team. It’s unlikely that the Marlins will earn a wild-card berth but they have well exceeded the expectations this season, given the salary-dumping ways of their owner and the poor support of their fans. With a team payroll of just under $15 million–which is $20 million less than the next lowest total team payroll, that of Tampa Bay, and almost $180 million less than the Yankees spent this year–Florida has flirted with a .500 record all season.
Here at the office we had a nice chuckle over a headline from the Trenton Times’ coverage of the World Cup: “Great unexpections greet Czechs, Iran.”
No, we can’t figure it out, either.
Eric: I did have a moment’s qualm before adding that “underachieving,” but basically, you can look at the situation two ways: you can take into account the lousy ownership and say they’re doing pretty impressively (your take), or you can take into account the fact that they’ve won two Series in their short existence and could reasonably be expected to do better than flirt with .500. I can respect both views, but I think the latter is held by the fans who are staying away in droves, so I went with it. Condolences from a Mets fan whose team is miraculously overachieving. (But wait’ll next year!)
Point well taken–and from a fellow Mets fan as well!
I doff my head to J. Cassian, and hope to heave a gem at home plate someday.
Off topic, re “wait’ll next year”: I’ve never seen “wait’ll” for “wait till” before but it gets 124K ghits. Remarkable. (Hence this remark.)
I actually thought as I typed it “Can you write it that way?” But that’s how I say it, so that’s how I wrote it. I’m glad the Gods of Google back me up.
BTW, how do you pronounce the young gem weaver’s name? The announcers on Boston stations have been pronouncing it as if it were Annabelle instead of Anibal.
I say it the Spanish way, ah-NEE-bahl. Sounds like the Boston announcers are reverting to the bad old days (when I was a wee lad) when we all said “PEE-dro RAY-mohs” for Pedro Ramos.
By the way, the Berkshire Eagle did have a headline show up in the New Yorker years ago. It was “War worries dog consumers,” published during the run-up to Gulf War I.
The New Yorker used to publish a dozen or so of those things in every issue. They called them “newsbreaks.” Now it’s one or two at most — does anyone know why they got chopped? I always thought they were among the choicest bits. E. B. White used to write a lot of the punchlines. He published a collection of them , called “Ho-hum” in 1931. (http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetails?bi=198145081&AID=7169465&PID=555228)
Hey, baseball is played on a diamond now–so the gem thing works a little bit–the weaving though–unless there are diamond weavers up in the Berkshires.
As to the Florida Marlins being a good team–duh? They once were World Champions but their owner is a filthy rich nutjob and he punishes South Floridians for not building him a custom-designed stadium at their expense and his profits by selling off the championship team and going up against Tampa Bay for the worst team in Florida title. The only hope for the Marlins is their manager, an ex-Yankee–ex-Yankees this year have made great managers, wouldn’t you Mets fans agree? Only problem is the nutjob owner has already insulted Joe, who almost got them back in playoff contention, and he’s about ready to throw in the towel on them. I’m throwing in the towel on this comment, thank the god of baseball.
By the way, if you don’t think money buys a great team, check out the Yankees this year so far. Hey, baseball is a Capitalist’s dream game; the citizens of a city will build you a stadium free and then allow you the owner to keep all the profits you make in that stadium–it is baseball players themselves who let themselves be sold like slaves to the highest bidders–the Yankees are drawing a record 4+ million fans this year–in Capitalism if you’ve got the bucks you rule the competition, which is what a business is, just a little game like baseball where all depends on the stuff you’re pitchin’ on whether you’re weaving gems or faux pearls on the mound. Look how New Yorkers are so loyal to their NY teams; yet those NY team owners would gladly move their New York teams to whatever other city could come up with the free stadium and tax breaks and allowed to keep all the concessions monies–loyalty to loyal fans? Check out the Brooklyn Dodgers; the New York Giants. It’s all about the geetus, folks; that’s all anything’s about in this Capitalist country, even the writing of sports columns and the language they use in it.
Ur fiend (certainly in baseball)
thegrowlingwolf
The reason for the shortage of newsbreaks in the New Yorker nowadays is the same as the reason for the shortage of “bus plunge” articles in newspapers: digital typography software that removes the need for short pieces that can be cut at will when trying to justify columns.
Of course, some people’s columns remain stubbornly unjustified, software or no.
Bus Plunge, Bus Plunge II. (Not a single comment on the latter!)
As to the Florida Marlins being a good team–duh? They once were World Champions but their owner is a filthy rich nutjob and he punishes South Floridians for not building him a custom-designed stadium at their expense and his profits by selling off the championship team and going up against Tampa Bay for the worst team in Florida title.
This could now be written, mutatis mutandis, about the Oakland Athletics, whose owner is threatening to move the much-traveled team to Las Vegas unless Oakland builds him a new stadium. (The team name is of immemorial antiquity, going back to the Philadelphia Athletics of 1860.)
Well, “the mound” also refers to the moms pubis (f version), and Freud has told us the weaving began when prehistoric Woman, noting her lack of a “phallus”, tried to weave herself one out of her pubes. Really. So weaving on the mound is normal behavior. As for gems, it’s common enough for women these days to have gems implanted in their bodies here, there, and everywhere, probably also as a phallus substitute, and the mound is as good a place as any and better than most. So weaving gems on the mound isn’t that much of a leap.
A footnote Civilization and its Discontents, where he also speculated in a different footnote that primeval Man could only tame fire after he had become continent enough not to keep putting out forest fires by urinating on them. He did recognize that both these theories were somewhat speculative and that further research was required.
Humanity would have been better off if Freud had turned his energies to urinating on fires rather than elaborating his cockamamie psychological theories.
They’re all phallacious.
noting her lack of a “phallus”
Why the scare quotes ? Has it come to that ?
CORRECTION: “mons pubis” not “mom’s pubis” , though it comes to more or less the same thing. And yes, it was autocorrect.
“Phallus” is a word only used by Freudians, for some goddamn reason, for a familiar body part with literally dozens of better names in English alone: “pecker”, “dick”, “peter”, etc.
And yes, it was autocorrect.
You’re being too modest, I don’t believe that for a second. Anyway I got a good laff out of it.
@ John Emerson : Freud has told us the weaving began when prehistoric Woman, noting her lack of a “phallus”, tried to weave herself one out of her pubes.
I’m so glad you cleared that up!
[Do I understand correctly that this is in `Civilization and its Discontents’ somewhere?] I seem to recall that our esteemed Hat once studied with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Wayland_Barber ;
perhaps she should be told?
I did indeed.
When I first heard people mocking that idea of Freud’s about urinating on fires, I was not impressed by their derision. I don’t mean I thought Freud was right, but it seemed like anyone who thought Freud’s theory was self-evident nonsense had never been camping with a group of teenaged males.
That was his source group, and should have remained his target group. But he was an overweeing type of guy.
John E.: CORRECTION: “mons pubis” not “mom’s pubis” , though it comes to more or less the same thing. And yes, it was autocorrect.
Autocorrect making Freudian slits? Turing test, go home.
Just how have they been training their neural nets?
By using all the data that people feed into autocorrect.
A Freudian slip is just something that might be phallus.
“When you say one thing, but mean your mother”
Freud’s account of weaving seemed so off-the-wall to me that I found myself wondering how he could have even… but then it occurred to me that Vienna possibly/probably had a pretty sophisticated sex industry, maybe ladies then knew things and had fashions that we’ve since lost?
Men may go pub crawling. Why should women be denied their pube weaving ?
Nowadays Viennese women can go to a barber who weaves little bears in their mountain forests:
Bekenntnisse des Intimfriseurs Robert S.
shut ma mouf
…familiar body part with literally dozens of better names in English alone: “pecker”, “dick”, “peter”, etc.
membrum verilli
D.O.: I well remember this scene, though I stopped watching Rake when the protagonist morphed from a lovable scalawag to a genuinely unpleasant person. Part of an arc, no doubt, but I tired of it.
Also I remember going, “Verilli?”
I agree, but I stayed with it to the bitter end. The showrunners either felt that creating more and more outrageous antics is necessary to keep the show popular or that when you switched to political satire showing politicians engaged in small-scale shenanigans will not make their point.
I’m wondering if one of his patients happened to be a terminally desperate trans man, and Freud concluded “finally I’ve understood What Women Want”.
@David Marjanović: That’s not the craziest possibility in the world. Freud definitely had a problem with extrapolating from interesting (but not necessary typical) cases to the human race as a whole.
WIth a clientele of Victorian* upperclass women, he basically had no chance.
* Uh… Francisco-Josephan? Same though: a very conservative monarch ruling for a very long time, more than half of the 19th century in both cases.