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Told  /  Journal Article

Playing It Straight and Catching a Break

Cue games have had a lingering influence on our language and culture—even before the contributions of “Fast Eddie” Felson.

It’s easy to forget how many of our day-to-day expressions have entered the language from sports and games. We encourage someone by telling them to “knock it out of the park,” we’re “blindsided” by an unexpected event, and we acknowledge we “dropped the ball” when we messed up on a project. We try to “play our cards right,” make sure we don’t get trapped “in the weeds,” and keep going when we’re on the “home stretch.” And it’s perhaps unsurprising that a lot of these expressions come from activities of gambling and luck—one can be “dealt a bad hand” when put in an unfortunate situation or be faced with a “roll of the dice” and an uncertain outcome.

One perhaps less-expected source of a range of these terms is the billiard hall. As English scholar Robert R. Craven writes in American Speech, many well-assimilated expressions come from billiards, “a game that the public does not follow with the same attention it gives to baseball, football, or other sporting sources of colloquialisms. Surprising, too, is the absence of stigma attached to most borrowings from the jargon of a game long infamous for its clientele of hustlers and underworld inhabitants.”

Studying origins of common phrases through various dictionaries, Craven found that billiards (and related cue games, snooker and pool) has given us:

  • “Know the angles” (understand the subtleties and machinations of something; be generally capable)
  • Break—in the sense of “bad break”, “good break”, “those are the breaks”, and possibly even “big break” (occurrence of chance, good or bad)
  • “Dirty pool” (unethical practices)
  • “Behind the eight ball” (at a disadvantage, in a tough position)
  • To “snooker” someone (to trick them)
  • “Call the shots,” from the rule that players must audibly name which ball they intend to sink before taking the shot (be in charge, predict)
  • “Fluke” (chance occurrence, usually to the positive)

As Craven notes, some of these terms have moved, as have some from cards or other sports, into daily use, completely divorced from their origin. He also writes that several phrases, “such as behind the eightball [sic] and call the shots…seem somewhere between emergence and assimilation. They retain their origins and yet are widely used in general discourse; they are metaphorical.”