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Joined: Oct 2004
Posts: 176
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Joined: Oct 2004
Posts: 176 |
Oh, I also meant to say that when I played football, the drill described above was called ‘The Meat Grinder’. I imagine that the names for such drills are as varied as there are football teams. Two of the other drill names I remember were, “Beefeaters,” and “Do-dads.”
I think coaches revel in coming up with stupid, cutesy, little names for drills. It’s kind of like their pet sayings, such as: “We didn’t come to win today!”, “I expect the team to give one-hundred and TEN percent!”, and, my personal favorite, “There’s no ‘I’ in team!”
One day, while our coach was giving one of his puffed-up, overly-animated ‘pep talks’ he trotted out the ol’ “’I’ in team” saying. My tolerance for these song and dance routines had gotten extremely thin, and before I could stop myself, I asked: “Is there an ‘I’ in ‘win’, coach?” The room was dead quite, which was not quite what I had hoped for. Nevertheless, I had committed myself, so, while the coach was trying to come up with a retort, I followed up with: “How about, ‘lose’, coach? Is there an ‘I’ in ‘lose’?” This time, the brighter of the bunch began guffawing. Slowly, the rest of the team chimed in with their laughter, even though they obviously didn’t get my point. Fuming, the coach still couldn’t come up with a retort, and finally decided to fall back on his ‘authority’. “Go give me 20 laps – full pads!” he shouted.
He never did answer my questions.
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Joined: Mar 2002
Posts: 1,692
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2002
Posts: 1,692 |
Eats Shoots and Leaves. ~ AnnaS Very topical!  I'm not quite sure which sense you're taking though, given the punctuation you've used makes it seem more like 'root hog and die anyway' if 'leaves' is a euphemism for 'dies'. Segueing naturally on to thinking about 'receive life, give life, leave life' perhaps 'eats, shoots and leaves' would be close after all. Then again, there's the Oz slang use of the term 'root'... This public musing isn't taking me anywhere...
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542 |
Spareye writes:
Charles Funk explained the expression, "root hog or die" this way, in Heavens to Betsy! & Other Curious Sayings:
Get to work or suffer the consequences. Although the earliest printed record of the Americanism so far exhumed dates only to 1834 ... it probably goes back to colonial times or, at least, to early frontier days. And, probably, its origin was literal -- an admonition to hogs or pigs when crops were scant to forage for themselves in order to survive. In fact, the expression sometimes appears as a command as given to a hog: "root, hog, or die!" The way it appears in each of the seven stanzas of the folk song under that title in the Archive of the American Folk Song Society, Library of Congress, each of which closes with the line, is:
Oh, I went to Californy in the spring of Seventy-six,
Oh, when I landed there I wuz in a terrible fix,
I didn't have no money my victuals for to buy,
And the only thing for me was to root, hog, or die.
this substantiates dr.bill's recollection; [editorial comment] and makes manifest why we miss some some old and dear friends.
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