When Apolo Ohno won his U.S.-record seventh medal, he told the media, "This is my third Olympic games and there is no other athlete here competing who has gone to three Olympic games and medaled every time."
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To medal is OK, to podium, not so much
- February 22, 2010 7:27 PM |
- By Erin Valois
Story provided by
By Gillian Grace, National Post
When Apolo Ohno won his U.S.-record seventh medal, he told the media, "This is my third Olympic games and there is no other athlete here competing who has gone to three Olympic games and medaled every time."
It's just one of many high-profile usages of 'medal' as a verb, something many of the linguistically proper find irritating. In their eyes, nouns turned into verbs are akin to jello combined with macaroni then turned into salad: trashy and potentially stomach-turning.
At the last games in Beijing, medal-some athletes provoked "outrage" in readers of David Marsh's language column in The Guardian.
However, he wrote, using medal as a verb is perfectly grammatically acceptable. The Oxford English Dictionary cites moody Romantic poet Byron as writing, in 1822, "He was medalled."
The next frontier of horror, Marsh wrote? As far back as 1992, an Australian newspaper quoted an athlete who hadn't won an event all season, "but has podiumed a couple of times".
Flash-forward two years, and ESPN is asking snowboarder Iouri Podlatchikov if he really expected to have "podiumed six times out of your first 16 World Cup comps."
About the Author
- Bruce Arthur Bruce Arthur is the National Post's national sports columnist. A Vancouver native, he has been with the Post since 2001, and a columnist since 2005. He is covering his second Olympics, after the 2008 Games in Beijing. He expects these Games to be slightly less propagandistic, and for China to win slightly fewer medals.
- Joe O'Connor Joe O'Connor is a roving sports feature writer with an open-ended beat. He joined the National Post in 2002, and has spent the past seven years bouncing from sport to sport, offering fresh perspectives and delivering unique stories wherever he goes. Whether it has been getting Don Cherry to open up about his love life; George Chuvalo to talk about heartbreaking loss; or racing down the side of a mountain with former Crazy Canuck, Dave Irwin, the veteran Postie chases a story wherever it leads. Before joining the newspaper he was a two-time silver medalist at the National Magazine Awards. Vancouver will be his first Olympics.
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