PLEASE DON'T TOUCH, OR DROP

A tisket,a tasket, a green and yellow basket;
I wrote a letter to my love and on the way
I dropped it, I dropped it.
~~19th Century Nursery Rhyme~~

If one of our contemporary football TV play-by-play announcers had written that old poem , it wouldn’t matter whether the letter writer had actually ever had possession of the letter – that is, actually held it in his hands. The only thing that would matter to him is that the intended recipient – his “love" – didn’t receive the letter. If he wrote it, and she didn’t receive it, then a priori he must have dropped it on the way.

What I’m getting to is the penchant these announcers have for proclaiming that any forward pass that touches the hand or hands of a receiver without being caught is “dropped.” Never mind that the pass might have been thrown with so much velocity that no human hand or hands could have caught it; or that no receiver’s arms are long enough to catch the ball thrown that far over his head or away from his body. Doesn’t matter – to these masters of the malaprop, the receiver “dropped” the ball. Never mind further that the clear and unambiguous definition of “drop” is “to let fall, intentionally or unintentionally.” That means before the receiver can be said to have “dropped” a pass, he must have had it in his possession to begin with and then let it fall. This is hardly ever the actual case; in fact, when that happens, it's called a fumble.

I suppose this is something we game watchers will need to adjust to so long as those who do football play-by-play and commentary on our TV screens are former coaches or jocks and not polished linguists. And it’s not like this is the first time;, they’ve already given us other malaprops. And the next time we hear about a “dropped” pass, we do have options: we can grouch about it or we can “audibilize” and change the channel.

gg