I give up. Less than thirty pages from the end, I am finally "throwing in the towel" to use a sports term from Josh Chetwynd's book, The Field Guide to Sports Metaphors: A Compendium of Competitive Words and Idioms. I do not care if I ever finish this book.
To give credit where it is due, this book fits my idea of a compendium very well. It is exhaustive. And it is exhausting. I had to make myself read it. But back to giving credit, because I feel like I'm doing Mr. Chetwynd a disservice with my abrupt assessment of his work.
So, what did I like:
Small sparks of humor throughout the book. There is a footnote about a horse named Read the Footnotes. The format. It took me a second to process, but once I got used to it, I enjoyed the delineation between phrases, a double bar with the term bolded and in all caps. It can get a little confusing, since the words sometimes occur right at the top of the page where one might expect to see the book title or chapter name, but once you've read through a few entries, it becomes an easy and convenient way to navigate the book. And the idioms are arranged by sport, so it's easy to follow. I liked that with each sport Mr. Chetwynd included a contemporary example of a non-sports usage of an idiom pertaining to that sport. It is also obvious that time and research went into this book.
This book bored me. I am a person who enjoys word origins,who also likes playing sports and occasionally watching them. I thought this book would be a good fit for me, but it turned out to be a little too specific for my taste. Many of the phrases are not very widely used in common parlance, nor is there always a very clear definition provided about what its off-the-field meaning was, so it occasionally felt like a dictionary of sports terms; uninteresting to the casual sportsman. Also, some of the terms were used in a way contrary to how I've heard it used in practice. One example from early on in the book is "batting a thousand" or gushing praise for someone's performance in a particular endeavor. However, the only usage I've heard for this term (Occasionally rendered "batting a million.") is an ironic statement indicating the individual's repeated blunders e.g.. accidentally spilling water on your date, after insulting someone who turned out to be a favorite cousin, after arriving late to the date. "Boy, I am really batting a thousand today!"I don't believe this book is ideal for sitting down and reading straight through. It would be more fascinating flipped through at random. Also, the phrases in general aren't super memorable, so if you read through pages at a time, it kind of just blurs together, leaving one with no interesting tidbits to share in random conversation later on.
There is only one person I can think of that I might recommend this book to: my big brother. He is a sports journalist.
I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for my review. This is my honest opinion about the book.
