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Show WHY NOT BE INTELLIGIBLE? The Butte Miner in a recent issue comments on the present baseball base-ball slang as follows : "It seems as though some effort should be made on the part of the newspapers of the country to report baseball news in a manner that is intelligible to the average reader who may not have taken a technical course in the great game. 1 '"The Chicago Record-Herald last Thursday ran a string of ex-tracts ex-tracts of baseball 'lingo' upon its editorial page headed: 'Sounds Crazy, but It Isn't.' "Here are a few samples, and if they are not double Dutch to most persons, they must be mind readers: The Pawless Prods looked like winners from the start and it was their game all the way. Witches cast a spell. They clout ball hard in fifth and win. Denver wins from champs. Grizzlies have on batting clothes and get three home runs. Panthers lost both. Dropped everything to the Bronoos on the home diamond. The Rice Eaters found Pujadas in second game. Brownsville swamped the Pelicans at Corpus Christi. Smelters wallop the Lobsters. "There is no key by which this jargon can be translated and if there were one, most of us are too busy to attempt to decipher it. ''It hardly appears just that a business man who enjoys the national na-tional game should be deprived of any hope of understanding a description de-scription of some match, for the simple reason that he only converses in plain and ordinary English. "It generally has been understood that one of the missions of a newspaper is to interpret scientific and technical descriptions and put them in language which any person of ordinary intelligence can understand, but when it comes to 'writing baseball' some of the sporting sport-ing editors appear to think that the more unintelligible their stories arc the greater is their personal triumph. "Possibly it is considered the correct thing to describe the great American game in Choctaw, or what might be mistaken for some 1 j aboriginal tongue, although it seems probable that the noble redmau would resent anyone mistaking this baseball 'dope' for anything of that kind. "Is there any reason why the baseball writers should not at least use United States, if they are strangers to simple English?" 1 |