Outside his name

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Dec 6 00:54:57 UTC 2007


At 6:39 PM -0500 12/5/07, Alice Faber wrote:
>I'm surprised Larry didn't already post this, but there you are. This
>morning (12/5/07) on Mike and Mike in the Morning (ESPN radio), they had
>a segment with a new football analyst, a recently retired paper. One of
>the topics of discussion was the incident late in the Monday night
>Patriots-Ravens game, in which Ravens players allege that an on-field
>official repeatedly addressed one of them as "boy". (Both player and
>official are African-American.) The new analyst, Marcellus Wiley, an LA
>native who played at Columbia University prior to his 10-year NFL career
>(as this was his first appearance, he started by discussing his CV), is
>also African-American. In discussing the "boy" incident, he repeatedly
>used the expression "outside his name", which, from context meant "not
>by his name; by something other than his name". An example would be "if
>the official indeed called Rolle outside his name..."
>--
Curious, I heard that interview (thinking invidiously that Columbia
doesn't seem to train its football players to speak as eloquently as
one might expect), and got the gist of it, but missed a couple of
crucial features (must have been the traffic)--one was the fact that
Wiley will be a regular on the show, and another was precisely the
"outside his name" locution, which I totally missed every time he
used it.  My ear is obviously slipping.

Outside my name, yours truly

P.S.  I am pretty sure, however, that Marcellus Wiley--boy or man--is
a recently retired defensive lineman, not a recently retired paper.
;-)

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