Bert Blyleven: Language Leavener

"Uribe's a guy you have to keep the ball down."

Poor Juan Uribe! Or as Bert Blyleven pronounces his name: Yew-reeb-ay.

Bert is my favorite baseball color commentator. He was a pretty good pitcher, and was recently, finally, elected to the Hall of Fame. He might be elected again, someday, not for what he did as a pitcher, but for the splendid way he is reshaping the English language.

Bert, who lives in Florida, likes to call himself a Californian, where he grew up. You know, "My California math says that . . ." (whatever his arithmetic suggests.

Bert has redefined the English language. For one thing, he has decided that adverbs are entirely superfluous, although he is reported as having said, once, that "The weather is well today." No one hits a ball well, though. It was hit good. We owe Bert, big time! He has helped you and I get rid of all those "-ly" words: gladly, helpfully. And anytime you pair "him" or "her" or "them" with yourself, you have to say, "him and I", and so on. "I" goes with somebody else. Bert has helped you and I with that, too.

He is modest. He doesn't claim credit for having thought his way through grammar and syntax, but it shows. Just between you and I, we owe a lot to he and baseball. He has redefined what a sentence is, too. You surely recall that sentences used to have nouns and verbs and a bunch of other stuff that modify something, but Bert has analyzed all that complex stuff pretty good, and he demonstrates that a sentence is what happens when you start to talk, and ends when you take a breath, usually.

Look, Juan Uribe hits pitches up and around his waist: he hits high pitches! "Uribe is a guy you have to keep the ball down."

You know, if the ball comes up Uribe, you have to stuff it back down. Think up-chuck, and stuff-down!

Usually, we get the idea, sometimes even when it isn't there.

Comments

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog