wide right (was RE: "That old 'distract the goalie' trick")

[Charles C Rice]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Victor Steinbok [mailto:aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 11:30 AM
> Subject: Re: "That old 'distract the goalie' trick"
>
...
> Of more interest, from the language perspective, seems to be the
> follow-up comment, "Wide right!" The phrase has nothing to do with
> soccer and I have never heard it used either while playing or watching
> the game. I am sure the English fans will back me up on this. If
> anything, there are often comments about how far the shot missed the
> goal post, but practically *never* anything about the direction in which
> the shot is missed, unless it's essential to describing the play (e.g.,
> using outside of a right foot to miss to the right of the post, etc.).
> There is simply a different culture--the phrase clearly comes from
> American football jargon, not from soccer and is aimed at American
> audience, most of whom, presumably, could not care less about the
> underlying plot.
>
>      VS-)
>
A quick check of BYU-BNC and COCA seems to support Victor's observation.
Excluding non-phrasal tokens (like "a path be cut 12-feet wide right down
to the bare earth" or "his legs were about that wide, right?"), "wide
right" gets 42 hits in American and 1 hit in British. The American corpus
is about 4 times the British one, but that's still a 10-1 ratio. All of
the American tokens are from sporting items (including one children's
story), with [American] football getting 36 hits and 6 other sports
getting one each, including skiing, where someone executes a 'wide right
turn'.

The British token is from a soccer discussion, but refers to a player in a
"wide right" position, a decidedly infrequent usage for the Americans,
though it does occur when referring to wide receivers as they line up for
a play (2 tokens). Adding the search on "wide left" changes little--26
tokens American to 3 British, all sporting except one American reference
to an airplane taking a wide left turn while taxiing. Interestingly, after
correcting for corpus size, the dialects are about even on "wide to the
right" and "wide to the left", with the single British example of someone
kicking a ball "wide to the right" of a goal referring to a penalty kick
("spot kick" to the Brits). I'd guess that rugby would have kicks pushed
to the left or right of goalposts, even in England, but you wouldn't know
it from the BNC.

--Clai Rice

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