220) Baseball Announcer Malapropisms and Other Verbal Gaffes

What would expect Dennis Eckersley, Chip Caray, David Wells, and Buck Martinez to know a bunch of stuff about? If you said "stuff about baseball", then you'd be (in most cases) accurate (except Martinez, who only knows stuff about baseball as it's played in the bizarre parallel dimension known as Buck Martinez Land).



If you said any variation of the following...

-Verbal communication

-Grammar

-The organization of English language

-Word meanings

...you'd be wrong


No, seriously: the guy on the right is paid to say things to you live on national television. That's his *job*. This is the world you live in.

Take these couple of recently-uttered gems from yesterday's 10-plus hours of postseason day one coverage:

• "His heartbeat must be pounding" - Of course, most of us are familiar with the sensation of our hearts pounding. Our heartbeats, which themselves are resultant of the pounding of the heart doing the pounding-level beating, do not themselves pound.


• "Whether the Twins lose or they win this game or not..." - This is not so much the product of an inadequate grasp on language as it is the result of someone's overambitious desire to continue speaking, even when thoroughly unnecessary. Those of use with basic reasoning skills needed only to hear the first four words of this phrase followed by the eigth and ninth words in order to extract the intended information.


• "That's really tantamount among their concerns right now" - Errr...that's really the equivalent measure of...the...among...their concerns right now? Huh. Okay. I mean, I'd have gone with "paramount". Y'know...so that my sentence would have made sense? But sure, cool. Whatever.

Look to our Twitter feed for more malapropisms and linguistic stress fractures as we hear them.