The first thing you need to know about this sentence from Baseball English —
a home run is a high fly that goes out of the park
is that I said it. If you know me at all well, you know that I am deeply, fabulously ignorant of sports — because I am deeply, fabulously uninterested in sports. And yet I uttered this Baseball English sentence, and I understood that it was, in fact, a pretty good definition of the technical term of baseball home run, and I was stunned. This stuff has seeped into my very being.
But why, you ask was I, of all people, defining home run. In fact, I was defining it for someone who turns out to be a genuine baseball fan, someone who knows tons of stuff about the game. But, alas, all in Baseball Spanish, which, despite the fact that the game is called beisbol (a transparent borrowing from English) in it, has an almost entirely home-made vocabulary, so that Baseball English might as well be Quechua or Mixtec.
Ok, you persist in asking, why was I trying to talk about baseball at all, never mind the English vs. Spanish thing.
Well, I was actually talking about ambiguities in English vocabulary with my caregiver J, who comes to me, as the resident linguist, with one penetrating question after another. His actual question wasn’t about home runs; I brought them up to illustrate an odd sense of the noun fly — the high fly in my sentence — because J had been bedeviled by nouns fly that seemed to have nothing to do with the motion verb fly that he was familiar with. Even fly for a type of insect (fly ‘flying insect of the order Diptera’) was somewhat puzzling. Then there was fly ‘an opening at the crotch of a pair of pants, closed with a zipper or buttons and typically covered with a flap’ (here we got silly, and mimed opening up our flies; well, this is a lot more fun than worrying about ICE or HSI or whatever coming to seize one or both of us).
And then I offered fly ‘a fly ball’, that is, ‘a ball batted high into the air’, which he found bewildering. How do English speakers know what they’re talking about? (To answer your unspoken question, in Baseball Spanish this fly seems to be elevado, which is perfectly reasonable when you think about it, but of no help in talking about baseball in English.) And so I concocted my home run definition, to show this fly in use. And it was a thing of beauty.
… Earlier in the day, when Sharon Gray of Bay Area Geriatric Care came by to take me to a medical appointment, we chatted some about the things I post on this blog, and I explained to her the notion of Kharkiv Opera, explaining how important, how essential, pleasure, play, and art were in times of great threat and alarm, and explained the slogan from the depths of the AIDS Plague, that we buried our dead during the day, and danced at night — our dancing being just as crucial to getting through the ordeal as our funerary duties.
I’m doing a lot of Kharkiv Opera these days. It makes me happy, and in a small way it helps to make this a better world. That will do.
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