The language of sport

English is full of expressions borrowed from sport, and people use them without noticing. Learning them is useful for exams, but it is also a small lesson in how languages work.

From boxing come to throw in the towel, meaning to give up, and below the belt, meaning unfair. From horse racing come neck and neck, meaning very close, and a long shot, meaning something unlikely to succeed. From cricket comes it's not cricket, meaning unsporting, and from football, to move the goalposts, meaning to change the rules after the game has started.

Two things are worth noticing. First, the original activity does not have to be familiar. Millions of people say neck and neck without ever watching a horse race, which shows that an expression survives on its usefulness, not on its origin.

Second, these expressions are not decoration. To move the goalposts says in four words what would otherwise take a sentence, and it carries a judgement: the speaker thinks the change was unfair. That compression is why idioms resist translation. A dictionary can give the meaning, but the judgement attached to it has to be learned from examples.

For a learner, the practical advice is simple. Collect sports idioms when you meet them in reading rather than from lists, write down the whole sentence, and use no more than one or two in a piece of writing. An essay full of idioms sounds less natural than an essay with none.