I've made no secret of the fact that the Irish as a people don't really "get" cricket for the most part. I think this is changing though, as the national team are making ripples and getting mentioned in the news, more and more people are coming around to it.
One thing that always fascinates me though, is the amount of cricket related terminology that has found it's way into everyday usage - even when people have no clue what it means!
You could say, they'd be "stumped" by it .... ahaha :*)
The amount of times I've heard people saying, right "off the bat", they've been "bowled over", or "caught out" on a "sticky wicket". I've heard people say when an elderly relative had died that he'd "had a good innings". I even heard someone on the radio the other day that a particularly prolific musician had a "good batting average". Apparently, "hat-trick" also originated in Cricket - and now it's been plagiarised by every other Tom, Dick and Harry sport.
This was brought home to me at the weekend, when I spotted an article in our local paper. It was about a member of a Gaelic football club that had taken charge of the scorebox for his 1000th game. The picture accompanying this was of him waving out of the box with "1000 not out" written out on the score display.
At first I thought I might be imagining this - I do have a tendency to imagine I've seen something crickety all the time, I think it's called obsession. But no, this time it was real. This hard-core GAA fan was using a cricket term.
It doesn't surprise me that there are terms from cricket out there in common use .... you don't spend hundreds of years in the psyche of an empire without seeping into the language. And in fact it's a two-way process, plenty of terms from other walks of life have drifted into cricketing parlance. What does surprise me is that people understand the terms - without having any grasp on the origin. I guess it just shows you how powerful cricket is - it can even get inside the heads of non-believers ;D
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Interesting observations. Might use them on another forum.
foot.ie perhaps? Welcome back too, how was the holiday?
Exactly. Didn't know you're a foot.ie afficiando. There's an Irish cricket section under Other Sports there but I suspect you know that.
Holiday was good. No problems except for Deirdre who's back with a dodgy stomach.
I'm not on foot.ie, you told me about it before in relation to the whole Rush/BobtheDrog thing.
Hope Deirdre's feeling better.
Later,
Ed
Yep, forgot about BobtheDrog. There's a guy called Sheridan from Rush who posts a lot of cricket stuff
http://foot.ie/forums/showthread.php?t=76568&page=10
I see you nabbed MY 4th team player of the Year Award ;)
"I see you nabbed MY 4th team player of the Year Award ;)"
It's not what you know, it's who you know eh :p
Look at the 3rds trophy - 2 years running it's won by the skipper! I smells a fix!
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