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ContraCostaTimes.com | 10/24/2006 | On the schneid for our word usage

It is often said that the Sports Department has its own language. Monday, it had it in 98-point type.

The headline atop the story on the Raiders' 22-9 victory over the Arizona Cardinals read "Raiders get off schnide."

To which many readers responded, "Huh?"

And that was just here in the newsroom.

There were two problems with this headline. One was that it misspelled schneid (any 19th-century German would see that). The other was using a somewhat obscure sports phrase in a headline. A really big headline.

For those of you in need of catching up with your obscure Sports phraseology, word-detective.com provides some insight: "To be 'on the schneid' means to be on a losing streak, racking up a series of losing, and especially scoreless, games. 'Schneid' is actually short for 'schneider,' a term originally used in the card game of gin, meaning to prevent an opponent from scoring any points."

So, we used the phrase correctly. One point for us.

-- Kerry Young, Production Editor

Just kidding. Happy to help. But you left out the important part of that paragraph:

"Schneider" entered the vocabulary of gin from German (probably via Yiddish), where it means "tailor." Apparently the original sense was that if you were "schneidered" in gin you were "cut" (as if by a tailor) from contention in the game. "Schneider" first appeared in the literature of card-playing about 1886, but the shortened form "schneid" used in other sports is probably of fairly recent vintage.

The whole column is here.

Posted by evan at 11:32 PM | Permalink

201 Stories by Anton Chekhov

Posted by evan at 12:16 PM | Permalink

Wendy Wasserstein, Chronicler of Women's Identity Crises, Dies - New York Times

Wendy Wasserstein, who spoke for a generation of smart, driven but sometimes unsatisfied women in a series of popular plays that included the long-running Pulitzer Prize winner "The Heidi Chronicles," died today after a bout with lymphoma, Lincoln Center Theater announced. She was 55.

A "bout" with lymphoma? Nice to see that even death can't dent that smarmy NYT whimsy.

Posted by evan at 4:51 PM | Permalink

The bestest thing I got for Christmas was The Complete New Yorker on DVD, 80 years of every issue, including ads and cartoons. This collection is the best rationale for the invention of the computer I can imagine.

Unfortunately, I don't happen to own a computer with a DVD drive. Seriously. And it will be at least a couple of months before I'm able to buy a DVD drive for this old clunker.

But then I will get absolutely no work done.

Posted by evan at 10:08 PM | Permalink

qwantz.com - dinosaur comics - January 5th 2006

via Language Hat

Posted by evan at 12:19 AM | Permalink

Posted at the usual place. Includes the solution to your Valentine's Day shopping conundrum, plus a touching story of publishing incompetence.

Posted by evan at 1:59 AM | Permalink

Publishers toss Booker winners into the reject pile - Sunday Times - Times Online

Posted by evan at 10:20 PM | Permalink

We have a new shipment of The Word Detective in hardback, and have extended (until January 15) our special offer of two free subscriptions to TWD-by-Email with every autographed book ordered.

Posted by evan at 2:32 PM | Permalink

Guess which one I am.

This is a picture from a few years ago I stumbled across last night, taken at a signing at a Barnes & Noble in Columbus, Ohio, for the humor anthology 101 Damnations: The Humorists' Tour of Personal Hells (St. Martin's Press, edited by Michael Rosen (left rear)), to which I contributed two essays. The folks with us in the photo are three of the other ninety-nine contributors to the book (whose names I have, alas, forgotten, as I am sure they have mine).

It was a lovely evening, the only problem being that no one -- no one -- showed up (except various relatives, which is worse than no one).

As we were cooling our heels on the mezzanine of the bookstore while shoppers milled around on the main floor below, it developed that the reason no one had showed up for the reading and signing was that the store's Community Relations Coordinator, whose job it is to publicize such events, had done no publicity whatsoever. Nada. Zippo. When I asked her, for instance, whether she had notified the Columbus Dispatch book editor of the event, she seemed genuinely struck by the novelty of the idea, and gave every appearance, furthermore, of being surprised to learn that Columbus did, in fact, have a newspaper. She had sent no releases to the local radio and TV stations. She hadn't even put a leaflet in the store window.

I tried to rouse our small band to fling her over the railing visible in the photograph, but cooler heads prevailed and we all slogged home in the rain. I like to believe that she was fired the next day, but in truth, knowing Barnes & Noble, she's probably a Senior V.P. by now.

ps -- I'll be interested to see how Google parses this post for their ad block below.

pps -- Stay tuned for more B&N perfidy.

update: Even more hamburger ads. If I erase that post about Ronald McDeadcow, will the ads change?

Posted by evan at 11:51 PM | Permalink

That's incredibly beautiful...give me a hammer...

ROME (Reuters) - If you thought art galleries were quiet havens of contemplation, think again. Looking at great works of art can inspire a strong, sometimes irresistible urge to destroy, Italian researchers have found.

Dubbed the "David syndrome," after the statue of the young Hebrew king by Michelangelo, the condition can provoke an overwhelming desire to damage the art being viewed, the psychoanalyst who identified the malady told Reuters.

Posted by evan at 10:26 PM | Permalink