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!