filthy

[Victor Steinbok]

And, as always, Ben beats us by a decade. He must have a very efficient
filing system. ;-)

     VS-)

On 10/26/2012 12:05 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> When the baseball usage of "filthy" came up on the list five years
> ago, I gave an example of "filthy changeup" from 1999 (see below).
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu>
> Date: Fri, Jun 8, 2007 at 12:05 PM
> Subject: Re: Greasy = dirty?
> To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at listserv.uga.edu>
>
>
> 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
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer

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