Thankfully, now that the NFL lockout is over, we can get back to hearing SAT words being used properly and effectively. At least in certain cases. Today, there's this dispatch, on new Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Nnamdi Asomugha, from the Reading Eagle:*
"There was a market out there with numbers that the media assumed I wanted," Asomugha said. " It's funny, you know, you don't pay as much attention to it because everything happened so fast, but you heard the apocryphal stories about the things that I'm expecting as far as numbers."
Apocryphal. I had to check my tape recorder to make sure that's what he said. Then I looked it up to make sure again.
A star on the field, his vocabulary is apparently at an All-Pro level, too.
*I know, I know. For the record, that's the Reading Eagle, a newspaper from the town in Pennsylvania, not the "reading Eagle," as in "a Philadelphia pro football player who can see and comprehend written material"—though either, ahem, reading would be perfectly understandable here.
Nnamdi "Apocryphal" AsomughaIt would be an insult to Asomugha, a college graduate, to celebrate too much his appropriate usage of a four-syllable word beginning with "a" that didn't happen to be "adversity" (a longstanding player and coach favorite). But one can forgive sportswriter Steve Patton for marking the moment, as he is probably more used to hearing things like, "At the end of the day, defense wins championships, but you've still got to take it one day at a time, bring your A-game, and give 110 percent."
As a literate sports fan, listening to a post-game press conference or reading athlete's interviews in the sports section is always a painful process. It's a horrible thing to see your team lose and then, only moments later, hear the English language also go down in defeat. There are so many sports cliches (and many of them, at least, are grammatically correct), that it can be very easy to lose track.
Fortunately, someone has gone to the trouble of creating a searchable sports cliche database. If you're a sports fan who somehow also enjoys seeing the language abused, it's worth a look—though you may not derive as many minutes of meaningless fun from it as I did.