Now that "March madness" is nearly upon us, it's appropriate to reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables: hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole, "J", rock, range.
But down-home slang is not basketball's only linguistic register. Curiously, there's a contrary tendency toward polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin. Some teams, for example, are said to be "physical." "Physical" (from Gr. physicos = nature) means, in basketballese, "rough" and does not imply that the other team plays either an ethereal or spiritual game. Until recently, a guard played on the "outside" and the center on the "inside"; nowadays they've become "perimeter" (Gr.) and "interior" (L.) players. A fast break has become "transition offense." A player doesn't drive to the basket; he "penetrates." Players no longer jump; they "elevate"; they don't block a shot, they "reject" it.
In an odd linguistic development, a point guard no longer passes the ball; he "distributes" (Latin: distribuere, to allot) it. In its ordinary meaning, to "distribute" a basketball would be to cut it into pieces like a loaf of bread and give each teammate a slice. Only a few years ago, it was still possible to "switch" from guarding one man in order to guard another; now players "rotate." "Rotate," derived from the Latin word for wheel, means "to turn on an axis, to spin." A defender who did not switch but rotated would pirouette, and pirouetting is not an effective defensive strategy. (A better classical equivalent for switch would be "revolve.") Even sillier than rotate: "rotate over" or "rotate around"– a usage that evokes the grotesquerie of a big guy in a tutu pirouetting across the baseline — a vision that is all the more picturesque now that traditional basketball shorts have been replaced by big ol' bloomers.
March 5: Last night I heard a TV announcer say that a seven-foot tall player had "a lot of verticality." If he fell to the floor, I suppose that he would have "horizonality." March 27: Also, "convert" for score, as in, "they had a transition opportunity but failed to convert."
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