Football synonyms boast great strength in depth
Under-pressure sports reporters fall back on an age-old rhetorical device to avoid repetition, writes Adam Hurrey
t is an easy trap to fall I into for a football writer. A game can easily become a “clash”. “Switch” is a reliably evergreen substitute for, well, a substitution. If you have already used Paul Pogba’s name twice in the latest report on his Manchester United future, there is always “the 25-year-old” or, perhaps in due course, “the wantaway Frenchman” on standby.
Such grammatical gymnastics are hardly a post-millennial problem. The lexicographer Henry Watson Fowler coined, with some irony, the term “elegant variation” in his 1906 book The King’s
English, in which he described the frivolous use of synonyms as having “the air of a cheap ornament”. His irritation was still strong in 1926 when, in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, he tore into “the second-rate writers, whose intent is rather on expressing themselves prettily than on conveying their meaning clearly”.
Beyond simply avoiding repetition, there appears to be a deliberate, Fowlerdefying playfulness to second mentions, a journalistic phenomenon that – like any cultural curiosity – has its own Twitter account keeping track. Recent examples from this very publication include “the tentacled cephalopod” (an octopus), “the deep-pocketed streaming service” (Netflix) and “the shellsuit-clad, bogbrushhaired, pencil-’tached pensioner from Rotherham” (the late Barry Chuckle), all hopefully typed with tongue somewhere near cheek.
Football match reports and news hits alike run the daily risk of falling into a monotonous word-rut, especially when focused on an individual player, manager or club, but this is where football most happily embraces the art of elegant variation. Liverpool, for example, are invariably presented as “Jurgen Klopp’s side” but one must be careful with “outfit”, which should only be deployed for more distant, lesser-known propositions (“crack East European outfits” had exhausted their mystique by the early 1990s, but you still see the occasional League Two outfit hanging around, getting in the way).
Matters get a little clunkier with club nicknames. Referring to anyone as “the Reds” or “the Blues” is hard enough to do with a straight face, let alone “the Citizens”, Manchester City’s mercifully little-used sobriquet (sorry, “nickname” had already been taken).
When you are a mere two paragraphs deep into a piece about specific players, their nationalities – innocuous in isolation – become a life raft for second mentions of “the big Belgian” or “the diminutive Spaniard”. Even then, the smallest slip, a single errant space, can be decisive: I came across a piece recently which referred to Arsene Wenger as “the French man”, which at least would not have needed running past the legal department.
Football enjoys some luxuries here, though: “match” and “game” are interchangeable in a way that tennis, for example, could not accommodate, but there remains the temptation to go for “encounter” instead. Meanwhile, a “performance” is as good as a “display”, but both are overwhelmingly preferable to a “showing”. The strength in depth of the footballing vocabulary, it seems, can sometimes cause more problems than it solves.
If he were around, Fowler might take issue with the odd flourish such as “the beleaguered 55-year-old Portuguese” (that is Jose Mourinho, to you and me).
Still, the grumpy grammarian never had to file 800 words on Paul Pogba for first edition, did he?
Though innocuous in isolation, nationalities become a life raft for second mentions