Pretty cool article in the Times about how sports nicknames are becoming more and more rare. Nowadays they're all corporate and unoriginal--like A-Rod. I was going to write something about what I think the best nickname of all time is, but it's early and I think I drank out of a dirty tap last night, so I'll just leave you with these (true) nuggets about Joltin' Joe DiMaggio.
1. His teammates didn't call him Joltin' Joe. They called him The Big WOP. For some reason that nickname didn't catch on in the media though.
2. At his favorite brothel when DiMaggio visited they changed the sheets on his bed from the standard satin to cotton so he could get better traction. They called them The DiMaggio Sheets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/sports/great-sports-nicknames-like-magic-are-disappearing.html
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
"Shitfaced: A Brief History" by Paul Collins - Slate.com
This might be the best article I've ever read from Slate.com. It traces the etymology of the word "shit" and in particular, "shitfaced." I really can't write a better description than the author already did in this thing. Suffice to say, "shittenly" used to be a word. So was "shiteth."
"Shit's rich history reaches back to Old Norse skita, and by Chaucer's time a romance like Kyng Alisaunder could speak of wondrous snakes in the exotic East, where "the addres shiteth preciouse stones." A 1641 treatise addresses a braggart as "thou cracking shit-fire," and one 1766 dictionary entertainingly lists everything from shit-abed and shit-breech to shittenly and shittle-come-shites."
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