Notes From My Knapsack 3-05-06
Jeff Gill

Things That Aren’t So

Four years until another Winter Olympics, and I’ll be waiting. The Summer Ringfest events I can take or leave for the most part, but we’ll be watching Peking or Beijing or whatever they’ll have decided to call the capital of China by 2008.
Winter sports and their inherent uncertainty – ice, snow, narrow skis and thinner blades – make for a more interesting spectacle, plus the requisite mountains and snow covered valleys. Even the obscure sports like biathalon or moguls create a strong storyline, with no one, no matter how good, guaranteed a top finish.
Bode Miller took his lumps, and seemed to have earned them, but few pointed out that even in his best year he’s gone oh for five in a third of the weekend competitions. Like baseball (can you say "Spring Training"?), hitting the ball one in three at bats makes you an All Star. Less we should fret about Bode’s non-performance than we can celebrate Shaun White for meeting sky high expectations in a sport with more variables than the quadratic equation.
Once again, though, I must kvetch about the "medal count" that is always at the forefront of coverage. News flash: no nation wins the Olympics. Countries send teams, but among the subtle messages of the Olympic Movement is that they march in flag by flag, teams neatly separated, by in the Closing Ceremonies they come in largely as a happy, merry mob, as athletes together.
Say what you will about the IOC (and they have their quirks and shadow side like any large organization), but they have nothing to do with the national medal total stuff, nor do they mark, honor, or celebrate it. If Germany gets more total medals than the USA, that isn’t an Olympic thing, and I wish NBC or whatever other media outlet would make it clearer.
"Advertising Age" may be the one publication that has a true interest in which country or what national team (ski, skate, curling?) had the most gold medals. What the Olympic Movement celebrates at its best, which was mostly what was on display in the Torino Games, is athletic competition bridging humanity. See entry: Korea in the rosters to get what I mean. Many flags, but one spirit in sport is the goal.
Now that I’m on a roll, let me note a few more regular flubs that I caught in the broadcasts from Turin which are actually long-running frustrations of mine. I know there are some fellow usage and grammar purists out there reading this column, since, um, I hear from one or another almost every week. You can point out my foibles, and I promise to print a bunch of them soon, but for now…
A homing pigeon or homing signal allows one to "home in" on a goal or destination, but when you want to focus or sharpen your process, you "hone down" like a knife blade on a honestone. "Honing in" on an endpoint of a journey just ain’t quite right, I’se thinkin’.
"Toe the line" is what sailors do on deck when called together for inspection, or Marine recruits along a certain infamous yellow stripe. At the starting line, you put your toe up to, but not over the line.
"Tow the line" is what you do when . . . well, when you’re wrong. There’s no idiomatic use of "tow the line" that I know of, except when you drive a boat with a water skier; if you look back and you’re simply towing a line, you should loop back and find what you lost.
And as we remember N’Orleans this week, a levee may "breach," but a "breech" may find you giving birth backwards, with the baby arriving breeches first. The Seventeenth Street Levee was breached by a barge swinging loose in Hurricane Katrina, and the Bush administration got caught with it’s britches down in the response.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you have a language pet peeve, even if it’s his, send it to disciple@voyager.net.