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Johnson
Johnson on American sporting metaphors
Jul 30th 1994
From The Economist print edition
BILL CLINTON, said the BBC after the recent rich-world summit meeting in Naples, was off to Germany to meet ruling party and opposition alike: he wanted to touch base with opinion of all sorts.
That is one of strangely few American sporting metaphors to have crossed the Atlantic. In the (right) ballpark too is well understood, and quite often used, by Britons. They can guess what getting to first base means. They have heard of taking a rain-check—from the old baseball ticket that offered spectators a second visit if the game was rained off near its end—but are not quite sure what it means. Few understand basketball's slam dunk, let alone its metaphorical use to describe a sure thing. Many can guess the meaning of a shut-out—in sport, a game whose losers did not score at all—but only from its context. Strike out, in its baseball sense, is, to Britons, meaningless.
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