On Writing Well 11.15

一 words and expressions

1. I could go on, mining every sport for its lingo and extracting from the mother lode a variety of words found nowhere else in the mother tongue.

mother lode: 原义为：a mine that is full of gold, silver etc；  引申为a place where you can find a lot of a particular type of object

例句：Her own experiences have provided her with a mother lode of material for her songs.             她自身的经历为她的歌曲提供了取之不尽的素材。

2. … of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white

tranquil：calm and peaceful and without noise, violence, worry, etc.安静的，平静的；安宁的。  镇定剂可以表达为：tranquillizer

3. Hold the hype and give us heroes who are believable.

hype：advertisements and discussion on television, radio, etc. telling the public about a product and about how good or important it is (电视、广播等中言过其实的)促销广告,促销讨论

4. The rest think they are Sigmund Freud, privy to the athlete’s psychic needs and wounded sensibilities.

privy: 允许获知的；知情的；了解内情的If you are privy to something secret, you have been allowed to know about it.

二 Thoughts  

The best sportswriters know this. They avoid the exhausted synonyms and strive for freshness elsewhere in their sentences.

Sports writers sometimes ignore what they are writing about and who their readers are. The writers tend to use terms wrongly other than the standards when describing what an athlete does. 

Never be afraid to repeat the player’s name and to keep the details simple.Another obsession is with numbers.

One new role for the sportswriter is to let us know what it feels like to actually perform a sport

We respect  the athletes and want to know something about their perspectives on the sport, not necessarily about their lives in general.We are not interested in the writer's opinions about irrelevant subjects.