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 (Don't) initial here
Posted: Friday May 21, 1999 09:21 AM
The baseball season is underway, all the teams battling for the chance to make the ALCS or the NLCS. Kind of warms the poetry in your soul doesn't it? The ALCS. Come the fall, gloriously traditional college football will compete for the BCS. How sad it is that initials are starting to overrun sport, like it was a government agency. Oh well, it's a CD, VCR, HMO world -- and it's become almost PC to use initials instead of real words. ALCS, for example, means American League Championship Series. BCS means Bowl Championship Series. And, if you will excuse me, that's BS. The irony is that sports championships always have had such evocative names. We're in the midst of the Triple Crown right now, with the Stanley Cup just ahead. The Masters. The Final Four. The Rose Bowl. Thank heavens all these events were established before the whole bloody world became initialized. Otherwise, the horses would be competing for the TC, the baseball season would end with the WS, and soon, in hockey the best teams would be battling for the SC. Somehow, I just don't think the azaleas in Georgia would bloom so brightly if we went to the Augusta National in April for the M. And, of course, it isn't just the names of events that are suddenly all initials all the time. At some point, quarterbacks became QBs. The disabled list was the disabled list for decades. Suddenly, it became the DL. Double plays -- what a wonderful term: double play! -- became DP. It sounds like a disease. He's got DP. But then, the whole term Major League Baseball had a certain unique ring to it, didn't it? Major league. Now, the technocrats who foul up the English language on TV actually refer to MLB. Worst of all, wins have become W's. P.U. I mean win is only three letters long. It actually takes longer to say "double-U" than to say "win." But now players talk about putting up a W. The saddest part of all this is that sports has lent so much colorful terminology to the whole culture: We aced that. Par for the course. We're gonna have to punt. I think the last sports expression to move into the vernacular was slam dunk. But the technology of sport has begun to replace the romance. I'm sorry, but I still cringe every time I see a football coach with headphones on. This is not to say, of course, that there weren't a few sports terms that have always been abbreviated. The one that seemed just so perfect was KO, for knockout. Then its offspring, TKO -- technical knockout. For some reason, the abbreviation GM, for general manager, moved into the lingo long ago. TD was used as an alternative to touchdown. And there were a few inside initials. For example: RBI. ERA. But they're such old rarities that you'll find them in crossword puzzles -- as sure as NRA, UN and GOP. Still, they were strictly exceptions to the rule. Nobody ever referred to home runs as HRs. Or free throws as FTs. Or right wingers as RWs. Sport was always so vivid, so idiocyncratic in its terminology. If it's just a bunch of letters, then we've lost something -- and something more than just the language. An attractive, distinctive name really adds luster to its event. It particularly amazes me that if the NBA -- that is, the erstwhile National Basketball Association -- is such a marketing whiz, why can't come up with anything better for its impending championship than the NBA Finals? I mean, is that drab? Is that a loser ... is that an L? Oh well, at least it's not the NBAF. Yet.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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