More weird sportscasterese ("More than enough")

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:21 PM -0400 4/19/02, Robert Fitzke wrote:
>Another odd usage by sportscasters is referring to time in terms of mony,
>e.g, a minute and a half left is a"buck and a half on the clock". And the
>similarity between time and money is goofy; a buck has a hundred cents, a
>minute has 60 seconds.

This one we discussed a few years back.  There were a lot of nice
examples that should be searchable (under "buck and a half") on the
ads-l archive.

[addendum after a bit of hard disk investigation]

Goodness--February of 1995!?  Can that be right?  I suppose so.  And
it looks like it might have been Dennis Baron and/or I who kicked off
the thread.  If anyone's interested and can't find it in the archive,
I can attach it to them.

Larry

>----- Original Message -----
>From: Ed Keer <edkeer at YAHOO.COM>
>To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 2:59 PM
>Subject: Re: More weird sportscasterese ("More than enough")
>
>
>>  While I never noticed Larry's "more than enough", I do
>>  have a question about sportcasterese:
>>
>>  One thing I started noticing a couple of years ago
>>  when I started watching/listening to sports more
>>  regularly is that sportscasters use the "of" possesive
>>  all the time and not the "-s" possesive. So they say
>>  "off the bat of Jeter" or "over the arms of Sprewell",
>>  etc. (Ok, so it's NY sportsacasters) Does anyone have
>>  a sense of how widespread this is? And has there been
>  > any discussion of why they do this?
>>

On this one, I'd wager (a buck and a half, anyway) that it arose
because the sportscaster can use that extra second or two to identify
the player in question--probably most obviously in football or
basketball or hockey rather than baseball, where there's enough time
and space to figure out the individual likely to be involved in the
play without needing to check their uniform number or name on the
back of the jersey.

larry