Tag Archives: acute

Everyday words learnt through a love of football

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It’s a well known fact that following the footy can be beneficial to your education. Maths is covered well; the 6 times tables are the first to be memorised, halves and quarters are simple to pick up and acute angles are easy to master. History and geography are touched on with the saying ‘via the cape’ (description of Richmond’s game style!) and even religion is taught when a ‘David and Goliath battle’ takes place.
But what of literacy? The literary world often seems poles apart from sport, but what did growing up immersed in football provide me when it comes to the spoken and written word?
The below tweet should answer that question.
Boot tweet
It suddenly dawned on me last week that there are a number of everyday words I know and use, which I first heard and learnt due to the footy. They’re a combination of words I learnt from hearing the crowd at a game (yes…expletives too!!), from reading newspaper reports, listening to television and radio commentators, to good old fashioned footy chat with family and friends. Whether I would have found these words without footy…well I’ll never know.

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I learnt some 'everyday words' in this manner at the footy!
(Jeff Hook image)

I decided to ask the same of my twitter followers and I was overwhelmed with the response I got! The discussion eventually skewed into footy sayings and even made up footy words, but for the purpose of this post I’ve included only everyday words which can be used independently from football.

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I grew up listening to these 'wordsmiths.' Sandy, Pete and Don.

Below is the list of 103 everyday words that my twitter followers and me have football to thank for.

Everyday footy words

The words were able to broken into a few different categories,  and a few of the stronger groups of words were;

Medical terms – Anterior, Cruciate, Hyper-extended, Ligament, Medial, Peptide (x2), Rupture, Sub-laxed, Navicular,

Corporate terms- Equalisation, Merger, Rationalisation

Footy Player Adjectives – Disinterested, Dour, Goer, Laconic, Lackadaisical, Mercurial, Mongrel, Opportunist, Prodigious, Tagger

Match Results – Annihilated, Boilover, Belting, Cakewalk, Hiding, Shellacking,

Kick descriptors – Wormburner, Soccered, Punt, Prodigious, Mongrel,

An old fashioned fight! – Brouhaha, Melee, Clash, Fracas,

As it ended up, melee was mentioned more than any other word, and a personal favourite was ‘stalwart,’ a word I certainly know firstly because of the footy!

Thanks to @Harri_Chas_17 @NABFW @SteveHealyyy @4boat @MarkDuffett @PaulErickson @ten_apples @AndrewGigacz @SirSuaveTheCat @APH1991 @cweaver1993 @HawkNinja76 @iamtheoracle @BumtownVic @roachy01 @JRRivett @DamianWhite42 @benno_76 @TheBlackCat1859 @Martin_Sanna @ossienet @M_1tch @Dgen717 @PaulMavroudis @Andrew_SaysSo @STaylor9891 @Tigers_Of_Old & @cade_e whose nominations made the cut. Sorry to everyone else who contributed but it was fun all the same. A special mention does go to @nervous_twittch who nominated ‘Porplyzia!’

It was heaps of fun guys. May football continue to educate both young and old!

PLEASE add any words you have footy to thank for in the comments section!