Sports fans are a crazy and possessive bunch. Our attachment to our favorite teams influences how we support them and even how we refer to them.
How the teams got their names
In the early days of professional baseball, the official names of teams did not include nicknames (such as ). childrens or oriole). You simply have organizations denoted only by their home city, called “New York Baseball Club”, “American League Baseball Club Chicago”, etc. Tradition use name like upland compatriots (after that U.S army), the Philliesor Quantity came from sports writers who gave these names to add color to their descriptions of the team’s trophy. It is only after owners realize their marketing potential that organizations officially use their moniker.
Standard name
In North America, across the four major sports, it is tradition to nickname the teams in the form of plural countable nouns. Often they are named for animals (Detroit Tiger, Chicago Bear, Atlanta Hawks), workers in an industry associated with their home city (Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers, Milwaukee Brewers, Edmonton Oilers), or figures of legend or history (Dallas Cowboys, Pittsburgh Pirates, Minnesota Vikings, Philadelphia 76ers). Other group names are simply representative objects (Denver Nuggets, San Antonio Spurs, Detroit Pistons). In all of these cases, the plural of the name reinforces the idea of a group of players working as a team to achieve something.
How do you make ‘Sox’ singular?
They also don’t present much of a challenge when it comes to grammar. But some group names are unique — not to mention a bit stubborn — in this respect. Red Sox And White Sox, for example, sometimes gives writers headaches because of the cute X at the end. The original teams were called red socks And White socksbut headliners, needing a shorter alternative, quickly switched to phonetic spelling number x (because sock).
White Sox And Red Sox use synecdoche—a linguistic expression in which a person uses part of something to represent the whole, as when one uses suitable for to refer to business people or crown to refer to a king.
In standard team names, it’s easy to form the singular from the plural: you can talk about a player’s first game as a Viking or a man who scored their first goal as a player. way is Penguin. But then how does one refer to a single player on the Red Sox or the White Sox?
No one seems to agree:
Everyone remembers Thomas as a White Sock as he hit 448 of his 521 career compatriots with them. But in ’08, his final season at 40, he hit three goals with the Jays in over 16 games, then went to the A and hit five hosts in 55 games. —Bill Baer, NBC SportsApril 20, 2020
Betts is the first Red Sox to win the honor since 2013, coincidentally the last time Boston won the title, when Dustin Pedroia won the award. — Mike Cole, NESN.comNovember 9, 2018
(The temptation to call a single player red socks or white socks It’s even more confusing when you consider that each player still wears two socks.)
And then there are questions about how to form possession when the group name is in the plural.
For a standard -S For plural nouns, the possessive apostrophe comes after S: the Quantity’ first draft selection, Rangers’ new football field. If you think about –x IN number x like standing in –cksthen the apostrophe will also follow x: the Red Sox’ third win in a row. But a lot of writers instinctively want to put a S with single quotes, resulting in the occasional occurrence of by Sox:
Brian Johnson has left the Red Sox’s alternate training site, Triple-A Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium, to return home to Florida, according to two sources. — MassLive.comAugust 10, 2020
The Minnesota NBA team is called wild wolfwith the second half of the name using the standard plural form of wolf. Each player on the team is theoretically one wild wolf. Meanwhile, the NHL team in Toronto is called is a maple tree, named after the symbol on the Canadian flag. Each player is one Maple leaves. However, the spelling of the team name follows its own grammatical logic, since the noun leafOf course, usually pluralized as leaves. So why don’t they? Toronto Maple Leaf?
The short answer is that we tend to treat certain words with their own grammar rules when they drift further in meaning from their constituent terms. (For a more in-depth explanation of this phenomenon, see our article on still life.) In other words: you’re not diversifying the maple foliage, you’re diversifying the hockey players.
Sports team with uncountable nouns
Starts with Utah Jazza team whose name makes a lot more sense when they’re based in their original jazz-friendly city of New Orleans, NBA expansion teams have shown a preference for uncountable nouns ( nouns that are not formed by adding -s to a singular noun): Miami Heat, Orlando Magic, Oklahoma City Thunder. NHL did so: Tampa Bay Lightning, wild Minnesota.
avalanche is a singular noun that has its own plural, avalanchebut Colorado Avalanche is considered an uncountable noun with avalanche sometimes seen in the singular for a player:
However, the score remained 1-0 in Vancouver in less than six minutes, when rookie Shean Donovan scored Avalanche’s first goal at 6:29. — Adrian Dater, Denver songAugust 17, 2020
In 2020, the Seattle NHL expansion team announced that it will be called Kraken. In doing so, the team ventured into uncharted grammar territory, as Kraken refers to a single mythical creature. Assuming that writers modeled on other sports teams, each ice player would also be called a Krakenthis seems like an unfair advantage.
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
