Skin In The Gane

[Alice Faber]

Doug Harris wrote:
>>>From today's LA Times, in an article re the shrinking number of people
> paying US income tax:
>
> "Many people would think if you are a citizen, you ought to have skin in the
> game, and we have more and more people with no skin in the game," said Scott
> Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan, conservative-leaning
> research group. "From a social perspective, we ought to be concerned about
> that."
>
> I am not really interested in sports, and I make no attempt to keep current
> on sports terms or clichés. But I have noticed with some alarm (!) a
> creeping increase, over the past couple of decades, in the number of sports
> terms, FAR too often unexplained, or self-evident, sneaking into 'general
> speak' -- the way most of us speak most of the time. 'Hat trick,' a term
> borrowed by hockey from soccer (where it actually _has_ a meaning), is a
> good example. 'Skin in the game' could be another.
> I certainly hope not. Hat trick sounds like something fun. Skin in the game
> smacks of violence, to one's own body or someone else's. Perhaps sports
> speak inventors' creed should, like doctors, include the concept 'do no
> harm'.


Well, as a sports fan (and observer of sports language), I suspect that
sports metaphors have long been creeping into the language. Even if the
expression "out of left field", say, has nothing to do with crazy
bounces in the Fenway Park outfield, the expression clearly has
*something* to do with baseball behind it. (As an aside, "hat trick" has
as clear a meaning in hockey as it does in soccer.)

But, "skin in the game" not so much. If it has a sports source, it's not
baseball, hockey, basketball, football, or tennis. If I had to guess at
a recent gaming source, in the absence of any specific information, I'd
look to poker, the hottest and fastest-growing "sport" on television.

--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber
faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203)
865-8963

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