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I'm Mike Pope. I live in the Seattle area. I've been a technical writer and editor for over 35 years. I'm interested in software, language, music, movies, books, motorcycles, travel, and ... well, lots of stuff.

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What surprised me about this job was the constant exposure to poor housekeeping.

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Blog Statistics

Dates
First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 9/4/2024

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Posts - 2655
Comments - 2677
Hits - 2,709,832

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Entries/day - 0.34
Comments/entry - 1.01
Hits/day - 347

Updated every 30 minutes. Last: 4:10 PM Pacific


  02:30 PM

Whoa, Friday again! And what a Friday to wake up to. (Linguistic angle: a trending hashtag on Twitter today is #regrexit.) But anyway, on to the words!

This week I'm inspired by a conversation at work about baseball, which yielded two new-to-me terms. The first is Mendoza Line. Mario Mendoza was a baseball player who played for various major-league teams in the 1970s and 1980s. One year when he played with the Seattle Mariners, he finished the season with a .198 average, well below the league average of .270 that year. In Mariner lore, it became a joke that someone who was hitting poorly might fall below the "Mendoza Line"—i.e., below .200. This term spread in baseball, especially via the ESPN show "SportsCenter."

The cool thing is that it's gone beyond baseball to refer generally to a threshold for mediocrity. For example, an article about movie revenues used it this way:
A sub-$2,000 per theater average means that it likely cost more for the studio to make and ship the physical print of the movie than their share of the box office. It is the Mendoza Line of box office numbers and regardless of the reviews, there's nearly no way to describe the film in positive terms.
There's more detail in the Wikipedia article, should you be curious.

In the same conversation I learned another term: Eephus pitch (or Ephus pitch). This is a "blooper pitch"—very slow (60 mph or slower) and with a high arc. Used judiciously, it can fool MLB batters, who are expecting much faster pitches. It's odd to watch; here's a video (0:27) of a 57-mph Eephus (and a confused batter):



And what about that name? It goes back to 1941, from a game in which the pitcher Rip Sewell threw a blooper. Here's the story:
After the game, Pirates manager Frankie Frisch demanded to know what, exactly, his pitcher had thrown to Wakefield. Maurice Van Robays, an outfielder with the club, replied that Sewell had thrown an eephus. When asked to elaborate, Van Robays said, "'Eephus ain't nothing, and that's a nothing pitch."
There's speculation that eephus is related to the Hebrew word efes, which means "nothing." I have no authority on this beyond the article where I read all this.

Onward to unexpected etymology. Today I have the word praline, the confection. I had no idea that this was an eponym, named after the Maréchal du Plessis-Praslin (a field marshal, I guess), whose cook is said to have invented this particular delight. (In the way of earlier eras, the actual inventor, a mere worker, remains anonymous.) We borrowed the word into English from French, and have cites that go back to the early 1700s. Anyway, there's your etymology; I'll leave for another discussion the question of how to pronounce the word.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.

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