Misconduct | What sports expression irritates you the most?

The section where journalists from the Sports de The Press answer a question with pleasure.

Simon Olivier Lorange

It is not so much an expression as a formulation: one calling upon the collective “you”. “If you concede two goals at the start of the match, you will find yourself in trouble. “You can’t escape the lead three times and expect to win.” You have understood where we are going with that. It is an obvious borrowing from English, which does not have the indefinite pronoun “on” to fall back on as in French. In an ideal world, for our articles, we transform the “you” into “we”. “You can’t escape the lead three times and hope to win. It’s much more harmonious, although we can’t do it systematically – we don’t want to change the essence of the interlocutor’s remarks either. But since we’re talking about expressions, my two favorites with the use of “you”: “If your name is…” and “you owe yourself…”. Ideally used together: “If your name is Nick Suzuki, you have to shoot more often towards the net. “You can’t not like that.

Guillaume Lefrancois

The sports vocabulary is polluted by layers of English. Some, like “hard to play against”, are obvious enough not to be repeated elsewhere. But “work ethic”, a somewhat too direct translation of work ethic, circulates abundantly without it being possible to explain why. Our friends at Antidote define ethics as “the set of rules of conduct specific to a society, to a group”, and also as a “branch of philosophy which studies the foundations of mores and morals”. In short, nothing here that describes the hours that Sidney Crosby spends in the weight room in his summer training. Our colleagues at revision suggest “good work habits”; among our friends at Radio-Canada (we have friends everywhere, it’s better than having enemies), we are offered “discipline, hard work”. There are several options to avoid tracing English.

Mathias Brunet

There would be a thousand, but the expression “grand finale” particularly annoys me. The Avalanche and the Lightning met in the Stanley Cup “final” last year, not in the “grand final”, because there is only one final for the first prize. The name “finale” should be enough to remind us of the heroic nature of this achievement without adding superlatives. There is obviously, in some cases, a match for the bronze medal or a consolation final, a final for third place or even at the limit a small final. But thank you for purifying “final”. Period.

Richard Labbe

The fabulous thing about the world of sport, among others, is that you can unearth obvious pearls of philosophy there. For example, a player who gets a “bad flu” inevitably falls in battle, because no one has ever caught a nice flu. In this way, there is the concept of the match which would be “without tomorrow”. From memory, wasn’t it Horace who had mentioned the importance of savoring the present day without worrying about tomorrow, or something like that? But your favorite players don’t eat that bread. Thus, it is necessary to “give everything”, “leave everything on the ice” (or on the ground), as if each match were the last. Which leads us to tomorrows that sing, or not, because if they don’t exist, they can’t sing. In this reality, a cruel defeat, for example in the framework of a seventh game, would amount to a kind of sporting apocalypse, because there would be nothing afterwards. Which is wrong, as we know, because it is essential to “prepare for the next match”. And how can there be a next match if there is no tomorrow? We ask you.

Justin Vezina

I know that within my close guard, the expression “vice-champion” to designate an athlete who finishes on the second step of the podium gives hives. However, personally, it is the expression “a shot without warning” that wins the prize. I understand that this expression should not be taken literally and that the player quickly fired his shot. But if there are shots without warning, then there are shots with warning. And that notion makes me laugh every time. I tell myself that one fine day, Cole Caufield will shout before taking a good slap shot and the commentator will finally be able to say: “A shot with warning from Caufield surprises the goalkeeper. ” My dream.

Nicholas Richard

I did not choose an expression as such, but rather a way of naming. In written or spoken sports jargon, one thing has been bugging me, and has been for quite a while, but even more so during the last Tokyo Olympics. For several weeks, there was talk of “the gold medal for the Canadian women’s soccer team”. However, it is rather “the Canadian women’s soccer team”. Because in itself, the team is gendered, it is either feminine or masculine. Sport is gender neutral. There is no women’s soccer or men’s soccer. Soccer is soccer! Same thing in hockey, where “women’s hockey” is widely used, while what varies is the gender of the team, not the hockey.

Jean-Francois Tremblay

I have developed over time several visceral hatreds of certain expressions. I hate with an unhealthy passion present participles or conjunctions following commas, for example. But nothing makes my body shiver more than ‘vibrating strings’ or any variation of the use of the word ‘stringing’, or ‘flickering red light’. In fact, I hate every expression used 10,000 times to express an action that is easy to express in another way. In short, you have to force yourself a little. I know my insistence causes some to end up with blank page syndrome trying to come up with a new way to say the same thing, but ultimately the texts are more fun to read. For me and for you.