Greasy = dirty?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 6/8/07, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:
> Alice Faber wrote:
> > > "It's a greasy job," he said, "but somebody has to do it."
> > (The speaker is a minor-league player, probably c. 20, from Western Canada.)
> >
> > More generally, in hockey, "greasy" generally means "gritty" or "tough":
>
> Not directly related, but recently I've begun seeing the word "filthy"
> used on baseball blogs to mean "extremely deceptive / hard to hit", as
> in "a filthy curveball". I don't recall seeing it before this season.

A quick check of baseball newsgroups on Usenet finds relevant uses
back to Feb. '99 (a post referring to a UCLA pitcher's "filthy
changeup"):

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.baseball.college/msg/477ec38a92b16670


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org