Team Talk
Sporting Words and their Origins
*Users in the USA and Canada please select your location at the top of this page to see prices in your currency. Users in the UK and the Rest of the World will be billed in UK£
About this book
Have you ever wondered why we talk about a handicap in sport, why boxing is so named, or whether a dumbbell ever rang? It was during the nineteenth century that hitherto local games with relaxed and varying rules were formalized. During this process terminologies developed to refer to these new standardized sports, borrowing, modifying and redefining words from all walks of life in sometimes strange and unexpected ways. Considering such subjects as why sport shares so many words with the fields of hunting and conflict, and how English sports terms have been both adopted from and given to other languages, this book looks at how words have come into the field of sport and how they have developed and changed.
Contents
- Sport and Language
- Sports
- Betting
- Clothing
- Competition
- Equipment
- Field of Play
- Non-playing Personnel
- Passages of Play
- Places
- Players, Roles and Positions
- Prizes
- Rules (and breaking them)
- Scoring
- Skills, actions, techniques and styles
- Slang and Metaphor
- Spectators
- Success and Failure
- Training and Injuries
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Hardback; October 2011; 336 pages; ISBN: 9780747808343