Quick Hits on the Origin of Sports-Isms: From Soccer to Slam Dunk

Some of the most common phrases in modern vernacular trace back to sports, but not always in the way you think. This episode uncovers how the British actually invented the word “soccer,” if boxing created the phrase “saved by the bell”, and how Lakers announcer Chick Hearn coined dozens of sports-isms that we still use today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Modern day phrases and idioms come from a plethora of
different times, languages, and regions. After all, there's literally an
entire field of study dedicated to the origin and evolution
of words over time ettymology. What I've always found fascinating
and maybe a bit concerning is how common it is

(00:51):
for these current expressions to end up meaning the complete
opposite of the original. Take, for instance, the saying jack
of all trades master of none. It's meant to describe
someone who is proficiently skilled or knowledgeable in a wide
array of areas, yet not an expert in one particular thing,

(01:13):
and it's generally used in a slightly belittling way. The
original expression, meanwhile, came about during the medieval times. Back
then jack was becoming a popular nickname for John, and
it soon became used in the same way that we
would say dude, Like that dude over there or that
jack over there, which also means an occupation like lumberjack

(01:36):
was basically the equivalent of a lumber dude, which is
just kind of funny. So the expression first began as
a positive description of a dude who was good at
a lot of different things. A jack of all trades
the second half, master of none, which took it and
made it a negative, wasn't added on until decades later,

(01:57):
and there was also a third addition to the quote,
and it's actually my favorite that one reads a jack
of all trades is master of none, but oftentimes better
than a master of one. The point is that time
changes everything, including the meaning of words, so it's not
necessarily shocking to find out that jack of all trades

(02:19):
master of none has shifted from its original meaning after
four hundred years of use, and that truth certainly holds
true for sports idioms and phrases. We as in humankind
collectively use thousands of expressions every day that were first
popularized by sports, like slam dunk, knock it out of

(02:41):
the park, or give it your best shot, and although
some still mean the same thing the original did, many
do not. Conversely, there's also a multitude of terms we
think come from sports, but actually originated from something entirely different.
On today's Quick Hits Upods of Sports dot MP three,

(03:01):
I'll be exploring the fascinating stories and surprising origins of
some of sports most popular expressions, idioms, and phrases. So,
without further ado, let's get into it. I've covered a

(03:46):
few topics on this podcast that center around the sport
of soccer, commonly called football in most countries around the world.
The United States of America is not the only country
who calls it soccer, though there's also Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
and South Africa. Those that use the word soccer have
probably been called out or roasted at least once by

(04:07):
someone from a country that refers to it as football,
probably with a line that points out that the sport
is mostly played with your foot, and often doubling down
by saying that American football should be called eggball or handball.
If you're a bit confused why I'm talking about the
word soccer and not some famous sports expression like buzzer beater,
bear with me for just a second. It's a fairly

(04:29):
common belief that the word soccer is an American invention.
As it turns out, the term was first created in
England in eighteen sixty three, a group of men met
at a tavern in London to establish a code of
rules and regulations for the fast rising sport of football,
which was played with a ball and your feet on

(04:50):
a field. By the end of the night they had
formed the Football Association. A few years later, another group
met in London for a similar purpose, this time to
establish the rules of a sport very similar to the
one established by the Football Association, but with more use
of the hands, which they ultimately referred to as rugby football.

(05:13):
So the sport established by the Football Association was called
association football and the other was called rugby football. During
this time period in the nineteenth century, aristocratic young man
at schools like Cambridge and Oxford had a habit of
shortening long words into more concise slang. Rugby football soon

(05:35):
became rugger, and association football started as as soccer and
soon just became soccer it had a better ring to it.
At the start of the twentieth century, the term soccer
began to spread, not just in the UK but across
the United States, no doubt because it separated it from

(05:56):
the already established sport of American football. If you're wondering, yes,
most countries that currently use the word soccer already had
a different sport that they called football before soccer became
popular in that country. So where does the gap begin. Well,
While the Americans ended up adopting the word as their
official name for the sport. The British began dropping the

(06:19):
term from their everyday vernacular around the nineteen seventies and eighties,
mostly because the Americans were using it too much and
they didn't want to be associated with that, So there
you have it. The word soccer originated in England as
a slang term for association football, and was later adopted
and popularized in English speaking countries that already had a

(06:39):
sport called football. So yeah, if you ever get roasted
for saying soccer, you can always say, well, you're the
one that created it, so boom, there you go. Okay,

(07:07):
next up is the expression saved by the bell. You
might think of classrooms and a certain nineties sitcom, but
the phrase originated from the world of boxing. The first
recorded use of the phrase in text came from a
Seattle newspaper article in eighteen ninety one, which described a
boxer who was nearly knocked out and around as being

(07:28):
saved by the bell. It was a quite literal expression,
as the ringing of a bell signaled the end of
a boxing round. Over many decades, the phrase spread into
nonsports related avenues and vernacular, where it still exists today,
and while that origin is pretty simple and makes sense,
there's always more to the story, and in this case,

(07:50):
it's that not everyone agrees that the term originated from boxing.
Don't get me wrong. The majority of entomologists, researchers, and
online databases tracking the origin of idioms and phrases tend
to largely agree that it did come from boxing. But
as with all things, there are a few anonymous Internet

(08:10):
users who disagree, and I had to mention why these
fateful few claim that the phrase actually comes from Victorian
England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when
one of the most common fears among the populace was
not giving your child too much screen time, but rather
being buried alive. Here's a quote from President George Washington

(08:34):
in seventeen ninety seven quote, I am just going have
me decently buried, and do not let my body be
put into the vault in less than two days after
I am dead, Do you understand me? Unquote? People were
terrified of accidentally being buried alive. And it didn't help
that narcolepsy, which could make people sleep for weeks and

(08:56):
appear dead, was first coined as a term in the
late night nineteenth century. To combat this, and by combat
I mean profit off this widespread fear, people began selling
safety coffins, a type of coffin built with a tiny
tube that brought air inside and a string that, if polled,

(09:16):
would ring a bell above the coffin, alerting anyone above
ground that the person inside was alive or a vampire.
The term saved by the bell was not referred to
in this context at any point in time in any
piece of paper or historical text that we can find.
So while the idea is an interesting one, it's clear

(09:37):
that the phrase we used today originated from boxing and
not those safety coffins, which, by the way, did not
once save someone from accidentally being buried alive, which might
actually be a good thing because it means that no
one was buried alive or the things didn't really work. Lastly,

(10:14):
we have to talk about Chick Hearn, the man who
single handedly coined dozens, if not hundreds, of the most
popular sports isms we use today. Hearn was the play
by play announcer for the Los Angeles Lakers in the
NBA for forty one years. To put that in perspective,
he broadcast three thousand, three hundred and thirty eight consecutive

(10:39):
Lakers games, most of which were aired on both radio
and television. He's also the first ever broadcaster named to
the Naysmith Basketball Hall of Fame, and for good reason.
His rapid fire creative style helped define the future of
sports broadcasting itself, and the evidence supporting just how massive

(11:00):
his influence was comes in the form of a list,
a really long list. So here's a few of the
popular sports phrases and idioms created or coined by Chick Hearn.
The bank is open, referring to someone shooting a ball
off the backboard. He blows the layup, referring to a
very easy missed layup. Air male special referring to a

(11:23):
particularly strong, blocked shot caught with his hand in the
cookie jar referring to a reach and foul. The charity
stripe referring to the free throw line. He's got ice
water in his veins, referring to a player making a
clutch play. Garbage time referring to the last few minutes
of a blowout game where all the starters are on

(11:45):
the bench. My favorite, Matt Todor defense referring to a
defender who lets a player go right past them. Too
much mustard on the hot dog referring to a player
that tried something a bit too fancy. Arm no foul
referring to a fowl that had some physical contact. He's
on him like a postage stamp referring to very tight defense.

(12:09):
Throws up a prayer referring to a player taking a
wild last second shot, throws up a brick referring to
a player shooting the ball and hitting the bottom of
the rim not a good thing. And finally, perhaps his
most famous phrase of all slam dunk, referring to a
player dunking the ball into the hoop forcefully. So yeah,

(12:32):
just from that list alone, you can tell the guy
was churning out phrases like it was his job, and
I guess it kind of was. Also, it's very fitting
that the man behind so many of these expressions went
by a nickname. His real name was actually Francis, but
he got the nickname Chick after his college basketball teammates

(12:52):
played a prank on him. They gifted him a shoe
box with what he thought were new sneakers inside, but
instead it was a dead chicken. Yeah, it's a pretty
horrifying prank, if you could even call it that, and
probably a potential indicator that one of those teammates might
have been a serial killer. At least according to criminal minds,

(13:32):
sports aren't just activities to watch or participate in. They
are living, breathing, constantly evolving mechanisms, a lens through which
we can experience deep emotions and derive greater meanings from
You can feel the devastation of a last second loss,
even if your team is playing in another continent and

(13:52):
you weren't there on the field, and even non sports
fans can feel the joy that emanates across an entire
city when that city's team wins a championship. Sports are
a vehicle for human emotions, the highs, lows, and everything
in between. So it's not surprising that we, in turn
use phrases and expressions from sports to describe our daily lives.

(14:17):
Idioms might evolve, meanings might shift, and words might come
and go, because that's the nature of language itself. It
constantly changes, and that's the beauty of it. I mean,
who could have known that chick hearn describing a guy
slamming a ball into a hoop would become one of
the most popular colloquialisms for a job well done. All

(14:38):
this to say, the next time you use or hear
an expression that you think comes from sports, look it up.
You might be surprised at how it came to be,
and you might even learn something new. And that does
it for today's Quick Hits episode of Sports Dot MP three.
As always, I'm your host Will Gatchel, and thank you

(14:59):
so much for listening. I'll be back with a new
episode next Thursday. Enjoy your weekend and I'll see you
next week. Peace,