What are sporting expressions and vocabulary?

Why do we use this language, especially at work or in life in general?

What is it about sport that makes it so influential in language, even with people who don't like sport? Sport is exciting and full of movement, so it expresses people's emotions whenever they want to add excitement to everyday actions. 

What are they?

The world of sporting vocabulary is quite extensive in English. It is a metaphorical world of phrases that compares your everyday tasks with various sporting events and actions. 

Three areas of sport and their expressions are described in this mini-course, and they are from the world of ball games, racing sports like running or horseracing and combat sports like boxing. 

Who uses it?

You might hear a lot of discussion and chat from business people or those working in the financial sector. Likewise, you might hear engineers, architects or builders using such language whenever they are competing for contracts. 

Anyone in life can use it if they think they are in a challenging or competitive situation. Nevertheless, business types and professionals like to use it in their highly-competitive world. 

Why do we use it? 

As we have just said, business people or professionals like architects, builders, journalists or even musicians for example, use this kind of language quite frequently as the nature of their industries are competitive. 

People like to challenge, compete, win and get revenge for losing in whatever they do in life. Homo Sapiens are a competitive species, even the young ones, so expressing their life as a game that is won or lost is important. 

Well, what types of sport do we borrow these expressions from. Here, we will present three main sporting areas. 

Ball games and team sports. 

Many ball games are also team sports. One major exception is tennis, which is generally an individual sport with occasional tournament events played as doubles, which are two-player teams. 

These expressions might refer to the area of play, the actions of the individual players or the teams, or the nature of the game itself. 

Racing; running and horseracing.

Racing sports require order, position and direction. Although there might be references to the actions of competitors or the sports themselves, a lot of racing vocabulary relates to movement or location, so prepositions are needed. Prepositions indicate position or location, direction and time, so whenever you combine them with a verb, they add this to the verb's characteristics and meaning. This is essential for describing races, whether they are sporting, to do with working situations or are metaphorical races. 

Combat sports.

Sports like boxing or martial arts are fights, battles or wars. In life, we sometimes think of challenges as fights or wars. Especially in business, all is fair in love and war, to quote an expression. So we need aggressive and assertive phrases to articulate our thoughts. 

Phrasal verbs for ordering, moving and positioning competitors. 

A phrasal verb is a verb with an adverbial, the adverbial normally being a preposition, which we have just mentioned. The phrasal verbs we present here are primarily from racing sports. They might be used to show the positions of the competitors in Formula 1, in running events or even in horseracing. 

However, all sports have a race element and obviously it is important to show the position of players in a team sport. If you think about teams competing to win a league title, then the phrasal verbs of getting ahead or staying ahead, falling behind, lagging behind or catching up capture the element of winning and losing points over time in a race to win a league. 

Likewise, the decisions of judges in combat sports might be applied to the decisions of arbitrators, referees or umpires in other sports. Something like a split decision between disagreeing judges might be applied to the decisions of authority figures in Rugby Union, Football Leagues or even in races like Formula One. 

Combat. 

This is the most aggressive of our three areas and it might be used to describe rivalry or situations which you almost think of as a war. Most combat-sport vocabulary in English comes from boxing, a noble ancient art which has always been popular in western countries. 

However, eastern martial arts have become hugely popular in English over the past 50 years thanks to masters such as Bruce Lee, who popularised Chinese martial art forms through teaching it and practising it in his films. Mixed martial arts (MMA), which contains elements of many combat sports, has also become more popular recently, and this also has emerging lexical items in English. 

Conclusion. 

Remember that you might not like sports and think it is all a waste of time. However, the language and phrases that come from sport are an important way for anyone to express themselves in English. This language is very useful for describing competition, rivalry or dynamic and challenging situations which change or develop quickly. 

In conclusion, sporting vocabulary is an important area of language for all learners to study.