Love slang? Love sports? Try out these sports-derived idioms and slang terms. Sports often feel like a miniature version of life with all its ups and downs, so you can find a sports term for almost situation.
In baseball as in life, the success is uncertain and should be celebrated. The best outcome in baseball is a home run, in which a batter hits a ball over the fence and out of the ballpark, scoring 1-4 points. So if you want to tell a friend about a presentation for which you received an A+, you can say, “It was a home run,” or “I knocked it out of the park.” Similarly, if you give that extra level of effort to something, you can say, “I swung for the fences,” indicating you were trying to hit a home run.
Again, like life, baseball has its down moments. If you tried very hard at something, but failed, you could say, “It didn’t work out, but at least I swung for the fences.” If you made an effort but fell short, you might say, “It was a swing and a miss.” When you have a good opportunity, but fail to take advantage, you might say, “I whiffed on that one,” whiff being the sound a baseball bat makes when swung really fast without making contact with the ball.
American football also contributes great vocabulary to everyday speech. If a team fails to make forward progress, they may punt the ball, which means to kick it to the other team, hoping to get the ball again soon and have more success. When a course of action is failing and you have to stop and start over or try something new, you might say, “That line of research wasn’t working, so we punted and tried a new idea.” If there is little time left in a game and little hope that regular tactics will succeed, a team might throw a Hail Mary pass, which has a very small chance of success. Since a Hail Mary is a kind of prayer, the phrase implies that the pass will only work with divine intervention. So you might say, “We really didn’t know which idea to pursue next, so we threw a Hail Mary, and fortunately it worked out.”
So try these expression out this week. Swing for the fences. With a little practice, I'm sure you won't whiff.