groin

[Charles Doyle]

An inveterate jock and sports fan myself, I would never refer to a ruptured testicle as a "groin injury." (I wouldn't even dare think about one of those!) A groin injury is a pulled muscle in the area of a man's (or, I suppose, a woman's) sole groin.  The question was whether it's idiomatic to speak of a person's having TWO groins (left and right).

--Charlie



---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 10:31:59 -0400
>From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> (on behalf of Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>)>
>On 5/10/10 10:20 AM, Charles Doyle wrote:
>> In the sports section of yesterday's newspaper, an Atlanta Braves outfielder was said to be suffering from an injury to his "left groin." The phrasing immediately moved me to wonder, "How many does his have?" I certainly would have said the "left side of his groin."
>>
>> Evidently, however (judging from the OED attestations of the noun), in the 16th century and earlier one could have multiple groins . . . .
>>
>
>In sports-injury-speak, a groin injury is an injury to a lower-abdominal
>muscle or tendon, so the left or right business would refer to which
>side of the pelvis the injured muscle attaches to. (/anatomical handwaving)
>
>What lay observers like us would normally think of as a groin injury is,
>instead, referred to more descriptively as "a (nearly-)ruptured
>testicle". See
><http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Video-Sami-Salo-reportedly-suffers-ruptured-tes?urn=nhl,239744>
>for current examples.
>--
>==============================================================================
>Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
>Haskins Laboratories                           tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
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