Sport Language Analysis

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It is said that sport is a language that everyone can understand. That it transcends culture, race, religion, sex, and language barriers. But within these sporting communities, a certain language style can be seen throughout newspapers, magazines, webpages, blogs, and vlogs.
Sport takes phrases and words from all other aspects of language, and manipulates them to suit the intended use. You wouldn’t expect a brutish sports fan to use words such as the likes of stalwart, profligate, adjudged and diminutive, but they do.
Millions of years of sports writings have developed the sporting language into what has become today. Just as important as match reviews, and player comparisons, the quick thinking of the onlooking commentators has brought phrases and …show more content…

In theatrical terms a sporting event can be seen as a theatre; the stadium as the theatre building, the playing surface as the arena, the players as actors, the coach as the director, and the game as the performance. In a religious sense, the match is the religious ceremony, and the stadium as the temple. Some players are also held in such high regard as you can see fans worshiping them and describing them as gods.
Not only does sport take language from elsewhere, but the language that has developed through sport has also found it’s way into other aspects of life. Recently it can be seen that politics has borrowed many metaphors from the sporting dictionary.
In the US common metaphors can be drawn from baseball, American football and boxing. Phrases like “the bottom of the ninth” (the final, dramatic innings of a baseball game), “knock-out punch”, “hail mary” (A last-minute chance to score a touchdown and win a game), “hit a home run”, and “front-runner” are all now fairly common phrases amongst the US political scene.
Not only in the US but across the globe can sporting language double as the language of

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