[Draft Post, January 2020]
I have written of my frustration with radio broadcasts of baseball games, specifically what I hear as inadequate descriptions of various plays. Numerous announcers, among them Joe Castiglione, describe certain plays in extremely similar ways, using identical words and phrases to describe plays and actions that, baseball being baseball, cannot possibly be identical.
In How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton noted that Marcel Proust often "got very annoyed by the way some people expressed themselves", such as a fellow French speaker who used English expressions like "Bye-bye" or people who referred to the Mediterranean as "the Big Blue" and to the French army as "our boys".