Photo by Barb Stewart
BY DEB AND TIM SMITH
This week we’re going to continue our colorful commentary regarding idioms and phrases containing the word gold. And, for the record, the definition of an idiom is an expression or phrase which takes on a meaning other than what the words would appear to mean on the surface.
We’re not going to “beat around the bush” or “cut corners;” we’ll just give you some examples you can “wrap your head around.” If you’re “feeling under the weather” when “it’s raining cats and dogs,” don’t get “bent out of shape.” So, there you have a flurry of wordplay exemplifying the concept of the idiom.
The past few weeks, we found our “pot of gold” full of “Acapulco Gold.” We found out why “all that glitters is not gold,” what happens when a “goldbricker” discovers “black gold,” and we also shared our list of famous people named Gold. This week we’ll address the advantage of people knowing when it’s in their best interest to speak and when it’s in their best interest to not. The idiom addressing this concept would be “speech is silver, silence is golden.”
SPEECH IS SILVER, SILENCE IS GOLDEN ~ For anybody who’s ever put their foot in their mouth, here’s your idiom. There are definitely times in life when the best course of action is to remain silent; it’s gauging when those times present themselves that becomes life’s challenge.
The general notion behind the idiom has been kicking around for some time. How ‘bout we go biblical and hit up Proverbs, 10:19 which reads, “In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin, but he that refraineth his lips is wise.”
In the more modern era, we started to hone down the wording. In his 1814 book Researches in Greece British writer William Martin Leake wrote, “discourse is silver, silence is gold.” In his 1836 novel Sartor Resartus, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle nailed the wording exactly as it reads in the heading for this component for the first time.
GOLDEN SPORTS ~We have just a few sports teams who have “golden” included as part of their nickname. The Vegas Golden Knights skate in the National Hockey League and we also have two college teams. Competing in the NCAA are the Minnesota Golden Gophers and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane.
GOLDEN SOMBRERO ~ Unless you’re a pretty solid baseball fan, here’s an expression you may well not have heard before. While a Golden Sombrero seems like it might be a cool thing to have, trust us, this is one fancy hat that you won’t want to find yourself wearing. In baseball parlance, if a player strikes out four times in one game, he dons the Golden Sombrero.
Multiple sources on this expression identified the original usage as being by outfielder Carmelo Martinez of the San Diego Padres in a Chicago Tribune article from 1984. But we actually found a few examples which predated that. The Clarion-Ledger, a daily newspaper based in Jackson, Mississippi, published an article using the expression in August 1979.
Also, a Detroit Free Press article from August of 1983 quoted the Tigers’ catcher John Wockenfuss using the expression. In a game where he came to bat having already struck out three times, he acknowledged not wanting to strike out again and “win the Golden Sombrero.”
Next let’s tackle the evolution of the expression from pre-to-post “sombrero” versions. The predecessor was certainly the “hat trick” which is traditional hockey terminology for scoring three goals in a game. So in transitioning a positive three-part hockey expression into a negative four-part one for baseball, clearly there was a need to up the ante. The hat needed to become bigger and the trick needed to become more ornate, hence… the Golden Sombrero.
Please allow us to close this component with the sage, if not comforting, advice that if you ever feel like things have gotten as bad as they can get, we have news for you. Things can still get worse. Baseball parlance does have not only one, but two, expressions for striking out five times in a game. A player who does this is said to have won the “Platinum Sombrero” or the “5 Olympic Rings.”
So what is the ultimate hat to be worn by a baseball player who has struck out six times in a game? Such a player is awarded the “Titanium Sombrero” and on rare occasions it has happened. Currently there’s no existing expression for seven strike outs in a single game, but we are hereby offering up our nomination. The first time a player strikes out seven times in a game we’d like to call it “Going to 7th Heaven” because we feel sure that the guy’s going to want to kill himself.
And just when you think the Smiths would have to be almost striking out of options on the subject, rest assured we have one more story left in the tank for you. While the seven-strike-outs-in-one-game scenario has never occurred in a Major League Baseball game, it did occur in a minor league game, actually the longest game in professional baseball history.
A few of you local baseball fans might be raising your hands right now as you read this. For those of you just nudging your way to the answer, guess which minor league team was one of the participants in the longest baseball game ever?! Yep, it was your very own Rochester Red Wings.
The game played out over three days during the summer of 1981. Everything took place at McCoy Stadium in Rhode Island when the Red Wings took on the Pawtucket Red Sox in a game that began on April 18th and finished on June 23rd! 66 days and 33 innings after the first pitch was thrown, Pawtucket would finally score the winning run to defeat Rochester 3-2 in the longest game ever played. Next, let’s play ball with our long-story-short broadcast of the game. Please go to the back page of this paper for our account of the game.
