Berra-isms

Feb 14, 2008 at 5:43 PM
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I don't know if everyone knows who Yogi Berra is but he is the master at making mistakes that are great examples of what is discussed in Ch.12. Yogi Berra is a legend in Major League Baseball for his accomplishments on the field, and rightly so. But off the field he has been known to have some trouble with his native language of English. Some of his most memorable sayings are: It's like deja vu all over again, I didn't really say everything I said, Tomorrow night is another day, Our similarities are different, We make too many wrong mistakes. There are many more of these and one is funnier than the next.

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I'm a fan of déjà-vu all over again. Similar to my post on tautological place names, it seems that bilingual expressions, or foreign expressions that are integrated into our language, are an area where this often occurs.

I would say that it's because the people saying it don't necessarily know the meaning of/behind it.

Maybe the deja-vu all over again means he has felt the same way numerous times, not just once before.

I like these. They remind me of something that has annoyed me recently about people's speech: using both "as well" and "also" in referrence to the same proposition; such as "My head hurts. Also, my back hurts as well." It's like a way of reinforcing this other thing you want to make important, but it's completely unnecessary and redundant.

It seems Yogiisms make good semantic fodder. I always liked "it gets late early there" which was in reference to shadows on the field caused by the setting sun. Unfortunately for Berra, late and early are equipollent. That is, 'late' presupposes 'not early' and 'early' presupposes 'not late'.

Nice example- but consider this...Could we say that the "also" links two ideas/phrases but the "as well" links the concept of "hurt" ?

I have a better example of what I was talking about (in case anyone wants to continue this discussion). This is from my 'Constructions of Deviance' book for a sociology class. Imagine adding 'as well' to the end of this sentence:
"The lesbian stereotype not only limits female solidarity, but ALSO minimizes women's ability to challenge collectively the patriarchal and heterosexist system in which they reside." (AS WELL).
This is a faux example of the type of hyper-usage of these terms that I hear too often.

Berra-isms

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