It Is What It Is: How the Oxford English Dictionary parked the bus against the language of football - Chuyên Trang Chia Sẻ Kiến Thức Thời Trang Mới Nhất

Welcome to the latest instalment of It Is What It Is, the sister column to Adam Hurrey’s Football Cliches podcast, a parallel mission into the heart of the tiny things in football you never thought really mattered… until you were offered a closer look.

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The dictionary supremos finally open their footballing floodgates

There are some cast-iron guarantees in the annual UK news cycle, the hardy slow-news-day perennials that keep the wheel turning. Which baby name was finally knocked off the top spot, according to last year’s official birth data? Which unglamorous, randomly selected British seaside spot is HOTTER than BERMUDA today? Oh, some twin sisters have achieved four A* grades in their A-Levels, have they? Again?

See also: some words that will infuriate your parents, let alone your grandparents, have made their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED’s latest quarterly release of new entries include “damfino”, “side hustle”, “jabbed” (in a vaccination context) and — what year is it again? — “influencer”.

Clearly, any emerging vocabulary has to prove itself in our language before the principal record of English words formalises its rise: can “galdem” and “mandem” do it on a cold, wet Tuesday night at the Philological Society? It seems so. And now — just six convenient weeks before the World Cup kicks off — the floodgates have opened to bolster the ranks of mainstream footballing terminology.

At first glance, this is not an adventurous, cutting-edge dip into the modern footballing lexicon. “While the OED already covered a large number of football terms, from catenaccio to nutmeg to water carrier,” its release says, “this select batch of 15 additions fills a few gaps in our formation.”

Some of that gap-filling was long overdue.

The Cruyff turn has taken 41 years since its first recorded usage to finally make the cut, along with the equally Dutch-born total football, while the Panenka (whose independence as a single word from the earlier, more helpful “Panenka penalty” is perhaps more recent than we might think) gently nestles in the back of the OED’s net, 46 years after its Czech inventor brought the act to global recognition. To the Oxford-based, word-listing stalwart’s credit, however, it rightly refuses to countenance the term’s use (Panenka’d? Panenka-ing?) as a verb.

Antonin Panenka chips his way to becoming a noun – but absolutely not a verb (Photo: Karl Schnörrer via Getty Images)

Other additions, such as zonal marking (first used in 1958, and increasingly sneered at by proper football men since about 2004), row Z (“humorously said to be the destination of a powerful but inelegant clearance, wildly misdirected shot, etc”) and outfield (“chiefly as a modifier, designating a player other than a goalkeeper”), feel like solid but unspectacular acts of housekeeping.

Even the freshest of the new entries seem dated to the point of being passe and almost impossible to use unironically in any credible football conversation.

Rabona, gegenpressing, tiki-taka and false nine all feel rather… late-Barclays era. As does trequartista, whose two superb supporting references — the Financial Times and a Twitter user called “Rossonero98x” — are impressively democratic. This particular group of football terms all originate from somewhere between 2005 and 2012: the OED, it seems, has gone full Turkish Super Lig in its transfer policy.

So if “false nine” and “tiki-taka” represent the Patrick van Aanholt and Demba Ba of this scenario, what are the Wesley Sneijder and Didier Drogba?

This is where things get a little muddier.

Added as variant 4(j) under the verb “park” is the already slightly dog-eared park the bus, popularised (but, crucially, never explicitly said) by Jose Mourinho in September 2004. The OED staff note the original Portuguese usage before sagely pointing out — like the football idealists they are — that bus-parking references are “usually with negative connotations”. Quite why it took 18 years for this phrase to break down the dictionary door is not clear, but it is entirely fitting.

Meanwhile, ending its 19 years of hurt as a draft addition to the OED is the oddly-but-now-definitively-non-hyphenated squeaky bum time, more than two years after it earned its own Athletic long read. Setting aside the famously unconfirmed, dictaphone-via-Glasgow words themselves, the OED takes something of a flyer with its definition: “The phrase has been explained as a reference to the sound of someone shifting restlessly on plastic seating during tense closing stages of a contest.”

Others may smell a debate there, but let’s not dwell on it.

Overall, this feels like a cautious selection of words to mark football’s ultramodern era, as if the Oxford English Dictionary has itself parked the bus in front of the game’s linguistic evolution. But the tipping point, where “slightly outdated” gives way to “Ooh, bit hasty, isn’t that just a Twitter thing?”, is a tricky thing to establish.

Even so, what footballing turns of phrase should finally be given the chance to trouble the OED gatekeepers in 2023?

Please do make your own nominations in the comments below…

cheat code n.

Near-omnipotent attacking player, an apparently unprecedented amalgam of footballing technique, power, speed, temperament and consistency, whose inclusion in a team’s line-up constitutes a perceived unfair advantage.

farmers league n.

European top-flight division that isn’t the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A or Bundesliga, in which stat-padding strikers innocently boost their reputation and transfer fees by running riot against provincial minnows such as Ajaccio, Zulte Waregem or Go Ahead Eagles.

it is what it is idiom

1.a. An unfavourable off-the-pitch and/or post-match footballing situation which, despite the best efforts of a player or manager, cannot be changed
1.b. Literally anything inanimate in football that currently exists

Erling Haaland

Erling Haaland – a cheat code, so they say (Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

50p head n. British colloquial

A player whose attempted header’s trajectory is at least 45 degrees off its intended course. Also head like a sheriff’s badge

one of those n.

A mundane on-pitch incident that isn’t immediately clear-cut in the context of the Laws of the Game; a coming-together of two players challenging for the ball with no obvious aggressor or victim; the going to ground of an attacker in the penalty area under borderline legal force from an opponent; an attempt on goal that is undermined by the placement or height of the ball as a result of its delivery to the shooter. Also one of them

half-space n.

The channels… but not quite.

stopper n.

A physically imposing central defender (but not a goalkeeper, I cannot stress this enough, no matter how logical it might seem to use it.)

Note: As the self-appointed custodian of the language of football, I will not accept “worldy” or “tekkers” (until at least 2024), “baller” (2025) or “thunderbastard” (ever).

This week on the Football Cliches podcast: Toe-plonks, fan extractors and the ‘men against boys’ threshold

The Athletic’s Adam Hurrey is joined by David Walker and Nick Miller for the Adjudication Panel. On the agenda this time: Kevin Keegan hosting yet another obscure industry awards ceremony, an Irish variation on the new-fangled “draught excluder”, a close inspection of Erling Haaland’s signed hat-trick ball, and John Terry gets the standard BeIn Sports treatment over in Qatar.

Meanwhile, the panel establish the criteria for a match to be labelled “men against boys” and whether differences in footballing class ever come in anything other than a “gulf”.

The corridor of uncertainty

Each week, It Is What It Is fields queries from readers on the quirks and anomalies of the language of football (and other niches). Here is this week’s stand-out poser…

The Athletic’s Richard Amofa — Could a “wicked cross” be defined at some point? I’ve heard it used rightly and wrongly recently

Firstly, let’s make a bold claim: a wicked cross is the best possible cross you can describe within the language of football that doesn’t involve an intended target on the end of it. Wicked crosses are right at the elite end of the speculative sub-genre of crossing; at the other, the Hail Marys of hopeful or searching balls (which haven’t even earned the right to be called crosses) or simply launching it (which, despite a traditionally more vertical approach, is included in the crossing genre for our purposes here.)

Wicked crosses must have a curling trajectory, as the inherent wickedness is derived from the fact it offers the defence an ongoing potential for it to be cleared, only to bend around them and towards the waiting forwards. This characteristic is also shared by inviting, teasing and tantalising crosses, none of which have the same lethal intent or pace, despite their aesthetic credentials.

Every type of cross by relative quality

Type of cross

Relative quality

Launched

Hopeful ball

Searching ball

Floated

14%

Drilled

17%

Looping

19%

Fizzed

24%

Stood up

49%

Whipped

65%

Inviting

70%

Teasing

74%

Tantalising

77%

Wicked

84%

Peach

89%

Put on a plate

94%

Pinpoint

97%

Inch-perfect

99%

At the real business end of the crossing scale, the hopefulness of the terminology is replaced by definitive self-congratulation. Quite why peaches became the figurative fruit of choice for high-quality deliveries into the box isn’t clear, but the best peach of a cross is one that is put on a plate for its picked-out recipient. Finally, pinpoint and inch-perfect crosses are successful almost by definition, and only a misfiring striker can be to blame if a goal doesn’t result, especially if the quality of those deliveries has given them “the simplest of tasks”.

This week on the Football Cliches podcast: Football in the dictionary, Gareth Southgate’s annoying postman and The Timewasting XI

On the second Adjudication Panel this week, Adam, David and Nick examine the Oxford English Dictionary’s new football-related entries, the six-year saga that is Gareth Southgate and his opinionated postman, and Glenn Hoddle adding to the sub-genre of Unexpected Co-Commentator Noises.

Meanwhile, the panel decide how each footballing scoreline should best play out for the neutral and pick their line-up of cynical game-management aces for the Pure Timewasting XI.

It Is What It Is is published every Friday — send in your questions and observations on the language of football (or any other curiosities you’ve spotted) by commenting below or tweeting Adam here.