Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Playing with Words (via baseball)

10/27/2010: The World Series starts tonight (that's the best of seven games American baseball championship, for my friends from abroad), and the San Francisco Giants are playing the Texas Rangers. Yes, the Giants (my Giants) are in the World Series! It's pretty heady stuff for a family of baseball fans.  Last week, I posted photos of the playoff game which I attended with my son, Henry. And here's the art journal page I made to commemorate the event. The journaling reads "Dear Henry, The timeless beauty of baseball comes partly from experiences shared across generations. Giants playoffs, 2010."


One of the things I'm loving about Shimelle's True Stories class is that each day there are several different prompts to help improve your writing.  One of the lessons today was about how words sound, especially sibilants and fricatives.  Having had two kids go through speech therapy and being someone who (at least partly) writes for a living, I found this really interesting.  I noticed that several of the Giants taglines succeed because of the fricatives involved:
"Giants Baseball:  Torture!" coined by announcer Duane Kuiper because of all the close games we win is full of crackling sounds.
"Fear the Beard!" a saying about how good our bearded closers are contains two very heavy fricatives.
And, finally, "The Freak", a nickname for our best starting pitcher Tim Lincecum, starts and ends in fricative land.
The Giants also have a theme song for the playoffs, which is based on the Journey song, "Don't Stop Believin'". It's a bit more redolent with sibilants than fricatives, but it will definitely get into your head like an ear worm and stay with you.  Click on this link to hear it, if you dare!

10 comments:

Amy said...

Rinda, you would fit right in here in Melbourne! We love all of this team craziness ... hubby rolls his eyes at me, but he is in the minority!

Go Giants!

Loving the class too - I'm right off track as usual, at least it is inspiring and more stories are coming to my head :-)

Amy said...

How could I forget ... curry was an unmitigated success!

debs14 said...

This class has got off to a good start hasn't it? I'm really enjoying it, my kids say I never use 5 words when I can use 55 and my daughter thinks that I can turn a sentence into a ten minute ramble!
You really are passionate about your sport and it shows through in a lot of your work, thanks for filling us in with the finer details of American Baseball!

Sian said...

Thanks to you I have just impressed by son with my baseball knowledge :)

Kelly said...

Love your post! I have to say I know nothing about baseball at all, it is not as big here in the UK however when we went to San Francisco we went to the baseball stadium and it was fantastic! For some reason I took loads of photos lol!

nancy y said...

makes you want play your air guitar doesn't it? Orange and Black!

And your baseball art journal page is such a great rememberance of the special time you and Henry shared at the game!

Sarah said...

Brilliant. Love your journal page and yep, the original Journey song's firmly in my head which I don't mind as I love it x

humel said...

Go Giants!! And I didn't need to click the link to get the song firmly stuck in my head, thank you.....! xx

Beverly said...

LOVE your artwork for Henry to always have a reminder of this special time! Hope ya'll enjoy the Series although I am pulling for the Rangers :O Josh Hamilton is a local boy and he has overcome some really tough personal times, we're all excited to see him on the path he was destined for. AND my dear Rinda...YOU WON my giveaway on the Let's Eat blog hope, a set of recipe cards featuring all the recipes shared. Send me your mailing address to neusebrats@aol.com and I'll have them out by the end of next week :)
Beverly

laurie said...

this is a baseball season your family will remember forever! i will be cheering the giants on in the series.