Here’s a semantic construction I hadn’t heard before. (This was on SportsCenter, or some sports show, on the weekend.)
bq. (1) Nevada upset Gonzaga by 19 points on Saturday.
That isn’t, or at least wasn’t, a sentence in my dialect.
I could say each of the following.
bq. (2) Nevada beat Gonzaga by 19 points on Saturday.
(3) Nevada upset Gonzaga on Saturday.
But transitive ‘upset’ couldn’t be modified by a margin of victory. Maybe I just had a quirk in my dialect and I should remove it, but (1) still sounds odd to me. I might try using the dialect in which ‘upset’ can be modified this way and see if it starts sounding more natural with use. With the way the NCAA tournament is going, I should have plenty of opportunities to try.
I have no theory whatsoever as to why in my native dialect this modification is (was) impermissible. One would think that the beating would be a constituent of the upsetting, and hence that any permissible modifier of ‘beat’ could latch on to that constituent. But apparently not, at least not in the language I spoke until a few days ago.
{ 19 comments }
Jacob T. Levy 03.22.04 at 4:53 pm
Sounds like perfectly good and common sportscasterese to me– which isn’t to say that it’s in everyday U.S. usage, but most sportscasterese consists of statements I wouldn’t use when describing a game in conversation.
Old radio news story: my college radio station’s news department tended to attract news junkies who didn’t necessarily know much about sports. (An exception was Aaron Schatz, who writes the Lycos 50 and has sometimes written for TAP online and TNR online.) But they’d try to emulate sportscasterese as best they could. I eventually wrote a style and usage guide stipulating, for example, what the minimum margin was in each sport before one could say “blowout,” explaining that baseball didn’t have “points,” etc.
brayden 03.22.04 at 4:57 pm
This probably wasn’t the first innovation Sportscenter has made to the English language. Boo-yah!
Rv. Agnos 03.22.04 at 5:08 pm
I believe, technically, it is only an “upset” if a lower rated Gonzaga team wins. I higher rated Gonzaga team losing is never an upset because Gonzaga is always ranked too high.
Jim Henley 03.22.04 at 5:10 pm
“Lord Angelo dukes it well in his absence . . . “
nnyhav 03.22.04 at 5:11 pm
What’s more worrisome is the adaptation of the sportspeak dialect into common usage.
(Though “Red Sox beats Yanks 5-4/On Chapman’s Homer” suggests it ain’t all bad.)
A-and Wilson only upset Europe by 14 points.
ogged 03.22.04 at 5:35 pm
I’ll put in another vote for (1) sounding fine.
rea 03.22.04 at 5:39 pm
“Red Sox beats Yanks 5-4/On Chapman’s Homer”
Red Sox ace J. Keats gets the win and (in a controversial decision by the official scorer), H. Cortez gets credit for the save.
Red Sox officials declined to comment on the status of their contract negotiations with Keats, who reportedly is seeking “realms of gold” to forego free agency . . .
Jonathan Ichikawa 03.22.04 at 5:41 pm
(1) sounds perfectly good to me. I’m curious about the dialect in which it is impermissible. How do you feel about the following?
(4) Nevada almost upset Gonzaga.
(5) Nevada just barely upset Gonzaga.
(6) Nevada just barely managed to upset Gonzaga.
(7) “Nevada upset Gonzaga.” “Just barely, right?” “No, by 19 points!”
(8) Nevada thoroughly upset Gonzaga.
Sebastian Holsclaw 03.22.04 at 5:43 pm
I don’t really see the problem with 1). In fact I kind of like it because it crams quite a bit of information into a short sentence:
Nevada and Gonzaga played Saturday.
Nevada beat Gonzaga by 19 points.
Gonazaga was expected to win in the Saturday game against Gonazaga.
My long-winded style could take some advice from that sportscaster.
Edward Swaine 03.22.04 at 6:02 pm
It also strikes me as unorthodox. Still, I suppose that if the broadcaster meant, “Nevada upset Gonzaga — by 19 points! — on Saturday,” you would be content?
We should also consider the possibility that this was intended to communicate information about the spread (that is, communicating both that there was a seeding upset, and a spread upset), but then this might be overly compact.
maurinsky 03.22.04 at 6:25 pm
Another typical way a sports broadcaster would say this is:
Nevada beat Gonzaga by 19 points on Saturday in a(n) (adjective) upset!
The adjective would likely be stunning, shocking, surprising, astonishing, etc. depending on the teams involved.
Brian Weatherson 03.22.04 at 6:37 pm
Lots of good points here. On Jonathan’s question, I find “Nevada almost upset Gonzaga” fine, but “Nevade easily upset Gonzaga” questionable. I have no idea why that could be.
Matt Weiner 03.22.04 at 7:13 pm
Yet another vote for (1) sounding fine. I think that once you let in “upset” as a verb in this sense this formulation was inevitable. Part of the reason I like it is that its meaning is obvious and it concisely puts all of the things Sebastian says.
Jonathan’s (8) sounds bad to me, though. One problem is that it’s not clear from it whether Nevada beat Gonzaga by a lot or whether Gonzaga was favored by a lot.
Does Gonzaga just win the same number of games no matter where they’re seeded, or is it that they’re more likely to win when they’re not favored?
Kieran Healy 03.22.04 at 7:39 pm
The CNN news crawler just told me
(1) Illini routes Cincinnati, 92-68.
How does that sound? Maybe 92 and 68 are buses.
the diddy 03.22.04 at 7:44 pm
I think sportswriters use “shock” to describe a game in which the presumed lesser team took the presumed greater team out to the woodshed. In other words, this game was too one-sided to be an “upset.” Remember, the original Upset beat Man O’ War by half a length out of 6 furlongs.
Alan 03.22.04 at 7:58 pm
Verbing nouns weirds them.
orangebob 03.22.04 at 10:14 pm
Yesterday my stomach was upset while visiting Nevada. I think I ate too much Gonzaga cheese.
Odd Ray of Hope 03.23.04 at 2:12 pm
No doubt language innovations introduced by sportscasters are distressing. But you can’t stop them, you can only hope to contain them.
cafl 03.23.04 at 5:25 pm
I’m confused…upset is a perfectly good verb. “Upset the applecart”, e.g.
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