I naively believed that to be a journalist, as I was, you
had to have a pretty good command of spelling and grammar to get a job and then
you could improve your writing. I believed that in broadcasting, you had to at
least be able to speak correctly to get a job and then add whatever personality
flourishes you wished. Local television news and the Internet have disabused me
of both myths. And baseball color analysts, like F.P. “he should of went” Santangelo,
seem to be hired BECAUSE they do not know grammar.
However, my point here – and I wish to ask any linguists
reading this if I am wrong – is that Carpenter deviates so much from normal
inflection as to make me even more insane. The articulation crime is the
repeated emphasis on the wrong word in a multi-word phrase. For instance:
“The clean-UP hitter”
“A road TRIP”
“A home STAND”
“A home run to start the NIGHT”
“Seven base RUNNERS”
“A good rbi GUY”
“He had elbow PROBLEMS”
“A real crowd PLEASER”
“The on deck CIRCLE”
“The New York Police DEPARTMENT”
“A big power HITTER”
“From the Chicago AREA”
“The one major holdOVER”
“A pitch-OUT”
“The box OFFICE” … ad nauseam.
This pox on broadcasting also has a peculiar and annoying
tic, shared by Barack Obama, of hissing the final “s” on plurals or possessives
ending with a “z” sound. As in “boyce and girlce” “runs the basessss,” “Alcatrassss
Island.”
Carpenter is from St. Louis, where I recognize that the “aw”
sound is pronounced as “ah” as in the “shartstop” position. But does being from
St. Louis mean you must emphasize the wrong word in a pair that everyone else
knows how to articulate? It is as grating as in the
Washington-Baltimore-redneck use of “ice CREAM,” “CEment” and “DE-troit.”
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