I just saw the theme of the week -- sports terms. My guess is that a most appropriate word will not be among the ones discussed, because chess is not considered a sport by many. The word is STALEMATE.

What I would like to know is how a compound "word" like "sticky wicket" (sticky (adj) + wicket(n)) can be called "a noun". My understanding of the English language is that each individual word is a "part of speech" and, therefore, we cannot have an "adjectivally modified noun" being described as a noun.

It's a noun phrase, if that helps.

As we are in Lord Stanley's season I am looking forward to some hockey words but I write to thank you for the Emily Dickinson poem. I was transported to third grade when at least 50% of the class rose to recite this - one of the easiest to memorize in a hurry. Thanks for the grin.

Regarding "sticky wicket", which you say originates from "when the ground is partly wet, resulting in the ball bouncing unpredictably", my cricket-playing friends disagree.

They say the ground upon which the game is played is called the "pitch"; the "wicket" is a set of three sticks that forms the target of the bowler and is defended by the batsman. When the bowler knocks over the wicket, the batsman's turn at bat is finished. So a "sticky wicket" would be a difficult problem for the bowler, and in a larger sense implies a difficult or embarrassing problem or situation.

Wow, ambros, it sure took you a while to post! Glad you finally made the decision!

Welcome to mclean, 44kate, and Joe E, also. Hope you all stick around.

EDIT: Joe, I hope I didn't cause offense by the way I typed your name. I only later realized how it would sound when spoken, and that therefore it might have "hit you the wrong way", as it were. It's just that I often shorten peoples' names here to something that is easy for me to type. No offense was intended.
============================================================

Attention, please: I did not get my Word A Day today . Did anyone else not get theirs?

Although wicket does refer to the three sticks (often called stumps) and the two bails that sit atop the stumps, wicket has by common use also come to mean the pitch between and including the pair of wickets at either end. It is also used to refer to a team's batsman being out as in "fall of wicket", which you'll often see in scorecards as FoW.

However, i would disagree somewhat with the technical definition of a sticky wicket as just being partly wet. It really refers to a drying wicket, the faster the wicket's drying, the stickier it usually gets. An archetypal example would be a short sharp downpour followed by sunshine on a warm day. The surface of the pitch is soft and spongy but hard underneath causing the ball to "stick", even to the point of making divots and it will deviate unpredictably both horizontally and vertically as the result of this. Getting "caught on a sticky" is something best avoided, which i suppose is what makes it an often appropriate description.

It's one of the things that make cricket such a great game, sort of being at one with the weather.

In my distant youth, I went to school in England, where I was forced to play cricket. (Like Anu, I completely lack the sports gene.) At that time, "sticky wicket" was meant literally -- when the ball (or bat or batter) brushed the wicket, and the bails trembled but failed to fall.

Quote:

---

In my distant youth, I went to school in England, where I was forced to play cricket. (Like Anu, I completely lack the sports gene.) At that time, "sticky wicket" was meant literally -- when the ball (or bat or batter) brushed the wicket, and the bails trembled but failed to fall.

---

Bravo Steve! I was waiting for someone to zero in on the origin of this phrase. The wet ground explanation is close but not on target.

Most of the world does not know cricket. The point of hitting the ball is to have it bounce into the wickets and knock off one or two of the two bails that balance on top of them. The wicket configuration is a set of 3 parallel poles at equal height hammered into the ground like this: | | | Now imagine taking a couple sticks whose length is equal to the distance between the centers of the tops of the wicket poles: - - You rest them atop the wickets so that you get a double arch design, sort of like this but with the dashes here sitting on top of the wickets: |-|-| What actually gets 'sticky' is the wicket configuration such that when the wickets are struck by the ball, the bails on top hang onto the tops of the wickets when typically they would fall. What you have is an unpredictable, irrational, annoying situation. The sticky wicket is not cooperating with your effort to knock off the bails. And yes, ground or pitch conditions could be one cause of the failure of the ball to knock off the bails. You might also want to check if one of the opposing team has stuck his gum under the bails to tick you off.

I hope this over-explanation helps. You can see how this simple situation in cricket can be applied to much of the rest of life.