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

[Dan Goncharoff]

AFAIK, wide-right has a specific meaning in soccer, referring to the
position of a player. In a five-man midfield, the outside midfielders
are "wide-right" and "wide-left".

DanG

On 6/24/2010 3:27 PM, Alice Faber wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber<faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: wide right (was RE: "That old 'distract the goalie' trick")
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 6/24/10 3:21 PM, Charles C Rice wrote:
>
>>> -----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
>>
> Missed much of this the first time around, but, as a USA-an sports fan,
> "wide right" refers to a specific missed field goal at the SuperBowl, a
> missed field goal that is one of the signature moments in Buffalo (NY)
> sports futility and that will some day figure prominently in the
> obituary of the kicker (Scott Norwood) who so missed.
>
> --
> ==============================================================================
> 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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