Soccer sullied by silly TV slang

EVEN the World Cup was larded with silly-slick American TV talk, the kind that substitutes the short, simple and clear with faux-hip foolishness.

Fox’s John Strong, who called the France-Croatia final, is too good to rely on such transparent nonsense. Yet he did.

Thus, you don’t “win the Cup” you “lift the trophy.” One doesn’t “score,” he “finds the back of the net” — even if the ball didn’t.

And Sunday, the teams hadn’t played “15 minutes,” as seen on the screen, they’d “played a quarterhour,” which might be appropriate if games were scheduled for an hour rather than 90 minutes.

(Two hours later, CBS golf’s Gary McCord at the John Deere Classic, rather than simply say a player will “mark his ball” (often with a coin) — or say nothing over the obvious — went with a derivation of a new one: “He’s going to go to the change.”)

And while Fox confirmed the conspicuous — Croatia’s short, skinny, shaggy-haired midfielder

Luka Modric is do-it-all special — that he’s facing perjury charges in a transfer money scandal, went unspoken. But what would you prefer, “More transparency” or the truth?

Once Upon A Mattress: Does WFAN employment cause commercial insomnia?

First, Craig Carton modestly claimed, “Everyone knows I had trouble sleeping” — until he discovered My Pillow. Now, Evan Roberts, claiming he’d only been able to sleep about “4½ hours” at night, has been cured by My Pillow.