“Working-Class Wannabes” and the Language of Sports

City Light workers installing utility pole, 1967. From Seattle Municipal archives, Used under creative commons license.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then, for a writer, a close second has to be a reader who says, “You know, you wrote something a couple of years ago and it still sits with me.” Paul Lukas, who blogs about the aesthetics of athletics — his turn of phrase, not mine; credit where it’s due — over at Uni Watch and has a weekly newsletter at Substack on the same themes, wrote a piece a couple of years ago for The New Republic that has stuck with me ever since.

In the piece — seriously, read the whole thing; it is well worth your time — Lukas decried the phenomenon of highly paid athletes and coaches in professional and collegiate athletics describing themselves as, and being marketed as, blue-collar. When teams use this kind of language, he says that they are:

“Just piggybacking on the perceived values of working-class people without facing the actual challenges of living as one. This reduces an entire class to a marketing prop or totem of authenticity. It’s a class-based version of stolen valor.”

These are his “working class wannabes.”

Lukas freely acknowledges that many players, coaches and even franchises come from working class roots. On the individual level, I don’t know that coming from a working class background and then being very, very well remunerated for your talents, not to mention the myriad other benefits of being a professional athlete, changes everyone. It may and, while having a decidedly middle class background, I would — purely in the name of science, you understand — be willing to find out.

That quibble aside, this piece of his has sat with me because; while I agreed — particularly when teams are marketing themselves in that way — there was something about the phenomenon that suggested to me that there might be something else going on as well.

Before going on I will acknowledge that I am merely an arm-chair linguist: Though I have read on and thought and discussed the topic for years, my academic experience in the field consists of a class I took over twenty years ago about which I remember two things: The professor was from Iceland and there was a classmate who was from Barbados whose accent went from pleasantly out of the ordinary to completely unintelligible in the presence of alcohol.

Secondly, I will admit that this may simply be the well known case of a man with a hammer treating everything like a nail.

That said, I believe there is a family of loosely related dialects centered around the various sports people play or consume. Furthermore, I’d suggest that speakers of any variety of English who are also sports fans have a tendency to code-switch into the appropriate sports dialect when talking about them.

There are two types of words or terms in play here, I’ll term them broad and narrow.

Narrow words are words that are hard-wired into the sport in that they exist purely because of the sport. They existed first within the sport and may have migrated out into the non-sport lexicon. My eldest son is a competitive bagpiper, and one of the statistics that the Eastern U.S. Pipe Band Association keeps is called the competitor’s Batting Average. Unlike the baseball term, I have no idea how to calculate it, but there you are.

Another — and this one bothers me to no end — is the baseball-specific use of the word velocity. Velocity is a vector; it is speed and direction. That said, I’ve never heard a pitch described as being 101 miles per hour southwest.

The use of the word “pace” to mean “speed” bugs me, as well.

For some — and I am one — the word “defense” is pronounced differently in different situations. When the word is used the action of a game — “this team has a great defense” or “her defense was incredible on that play” — the word is accented on the first syllable DE-fense. When used, even in a sports context, to describe the act of defending — “the coach’s defense of his players’ actions was inexcusable” or “the Battle of Culloden was Bonnie Prince Charlie’s last defense of his claim to the throne of the United Kingdom” — the word takes its stress on the second syllable, de-FENSE. The former pronunciation is, for me, exclusive to sports.

Broad words and terms are those which have migrated into sports and in doing so have become either used differently, pronounced differently or now used almost, if not exclusively, in a sports context. There are a great many of these. Score comes from the tallies etched next to a person’s name to keep track of the number of purchases as yet unpaid for, such as drinks in a bar.  Score has, of course, migrated back out to non-sports usage in the phrase “what’s the score?” in the sense of “what is the state of affairs?” Speaking of scores, a goal was, in the early days of soccer, said to be achieved, not scored. Thus a goal, in the sense of an objective, became not only the word for the objective of the game but also the area into which a ball or puck has to enter in order for that objective to be met. The person whose job it was primarily to maintain the integrity of that area, to keep or tend to it, became the goalkeeper or goaltender. Scrimmage is a dialectical variation on the word “skirmish” from the middle ages and now resides only in the sports world.

Needless to say, there is a steady flow of terminology between the sports dialects and between the sports and non-sports dialects.

What does all this have to do with sports notion of blue-collarness and the use of working class tropes and values?

Well, I think that “blue-collar” has entered into the sports dialect as a broad term, denoting hard work and the willingness to put the team above the self. It has become part of the way people who talk about sports talk about sports, particularly, I think, in hockey and football, for reasons I’m still mulling over.

Does this nullify Paul Lukas’s objections?

No; and it wasn’t meant to. There are plenty of terms that were long considered acceptable until they weren’t. I do think the use of the idea “working class values” as a “marketing prop or totem of authenticity” is objectionable. My point is that these notions likely snuck into the sports discourse under the guise of just being part of the dialect of sports, only to have the marketing folks decide to adopt it, overdo it beyond the point of exhaustion — there was a fad a few years ago of giving college football uniforms a literal blue collar — and never really consider if it was appropriate at all, if we’re being charitable, or, less charitably, one could say that they knew what they were doing and had no qualms about doing it. I’m sure there was some of that, to what degree, I don’t know.