Fwd: "Dairy Queen", the (basketball) verb

[Laurence Horn]

So in tonight's national semifinal between Louisville and Kentucky, I haven't heard Kellogg mention the danger of anyone being Dairy Queened, but he did talk about one of the Kentucky players being "undersung" (which I thought was more innovative than it turns out, on closer examination, to be) and then mentioned Kentucky's "spurtability".  Neither is in the OED, but the former has 177K raw g-hits.  As for the latter, it does have 4.2K, but perhaps significantly the first one that comes up is--for Clark Kellogg's wikipedia entry: 'He is known for using the phrase "spurtability" as a reference to a team's ability to score points in quick succession.'  

LH

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> Date: March 25, 2012 3:09:13 PM EDT
> To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Subject: "Dairy Queen", the (basketball) verb
> 
> Announcer of Kentucky-Baylor Elite Eight basketball game in the men's NCAA tournament currently showing live on CBS.  Color commentator Clark Kellogg explains at 9:00 left in the first half why Kentucky is so tough to beat, especially given the prowess of their freshman star player and shot blocker par excellence Anthony Davis:
> 
> "One of the things that Kentucky does really well is that they don't foul a lot. For all of their blocked shots, they typically don't get into foul trouble.  I mean, Anthony Davis has only been Dairy-Queened once."  
> 
> The allusion is to a player being disqualified or DQ'ed, rendered ineligible by accumulating 5 personal fouls.  DQ = DisQualified but DQ also = Dairy Queen, and Euclid tells us that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, so…
> 
> LH
> 
> 
> 

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