And the single most overused term in sports is....

I think it's humorous when sportscasters, and athletes (many of whom do not have an intelligence quotient high enough to realize what i'm referring to) learn a new word. This word, eventually permeates the sporting world, becoming the greatest thing since the inception of paying for your ticket to see a game (it was hard times for the venue owners before that).

Anyway, everywhere you turn, you hear the aforementioned sportscasters and athelets trying to sound enlightened, by using words that they first heard not in school, but on espn. The word i'm referring to? Adversity.

Adversity i think is even more overused than "extreme" was a few years back, when you could buy toothpaste that was "extreme" (i tried it... and if by "extreme" they meant "expensive, but just like any other kind of toothpaste" then they succeeded wholehartedly).

Anyway, let's come up with a new word shall we? A quick search in a handy dandy thesaurus pops up these words:

bad luck, bummer, calamity, catastrophe, crunch, destitution, difficulty, disaster, downer, drag, exigency, hard knocks, hard time, holy mess, hot water, indigence, jam, misfortune, need, pickle, pinch, poverty, privation, rigor, rotten luck, scrape, straits, throe, ticklish spot, tough break, tough luck, trial, trouble, unholy mess, vicissitude, want

There's some good stuff in there. I mean, read through it again. This is what a standard blah blah blah phrase would sound with some of the better words substituted for "adversity."

"I was so proud of our team today to be able to fight through the (calamity/holy mess/pickle/ticklish spot/unholy mess/vicissitude) and come out winners"

Now, isn't that a better sentence? I thought so. And i'm glad that you, loyal reader think so as well.

I live for the day where i'll hear a football player after a huge win utter: "we were able to adapt and react to the vicissitudes that are inherent in opening up a huge can of whoop-ass on (insert team here)." Boy, that'll be the day.

Well, this column might have been better except that i had so much (destitution/misfortune/privation/calamity) to fight through, that it just wasn't quite up to par.



Mitch Hedberg's QotD:

I use the word totally too much. Whenever people ask me something I always say "totally." I need to find a new word that's different, but has the same meaning. So when someone asks me: "Mitch, do you like submarine sandwiches?" I'll say: "all-encompassingly!"