This may sound a bissel meshuga (a little crazy), but the name of a common play in pro football these days comes straight from Yiddish.
And the term has given new meaning to the most important part of the game, the end zone.
That’s because we have witnessed the rise of the “tush push,” the strategy of pushing a ball carrier’s backside to propel him through the line of defenders.
Because of an alleged injury risk, the tush push provoked considerable schmoozing after the Philadelphia Eagles used it in February’s Super Bowl victory over the Kansas City Chiefs.
What’s not up for debate is the origin of “tush” – it’s derived from tuchus, the Yiddish version of what the French would politely call the derriere.
Some have tried to anglicize the term. Considering the play’s high profile in Philadelphia, they call it the “brotherly shove.” Clever, but let’s rank that as just a field goal while “tush push” is a linguistic touchdown.
Many thanks to Yiddish for its colorful addition to our offbeat sports vocabulary, but English has provided most of the quirky terms on its own.
For instance, since this is baseball season, we might contemplate what an outfielder does with a “can of corn.”
Answer: He catches it, because that’s baseball parlance for an easy, routine fly ball.
Some say the term arose in baseball’s early days, when grocers put canned goods on high shelves and clerks used long sticks to knock them off, easily catching them in their outstretched aprons.
And what about rookies promoted to the majors for “a cup of coffee?” That’s figuratively how long some last before banishment back to the bush leagues.
Then there’s “chin music”– a high, inside pitch that seems to hum as it whizzes past the batter.
We can also mention the “frozen rope,” a line-drive hit so hard it barely rises in an arc, and the “dying quail,” a pop fly that falls too fast for a fielder to reach.
Catchers, who routinely get roughed up as they toil behind home plate, wear protective gear known drolly as “the tools of ignorance.”
Red Sox broadcaster and former mound ace Dennis Eckersley was fond of describing a fastball up in the strike zone as “high cheese.”
And what about the “worm-burner?” That’s a scorching grqss-cutter to the “hot corner” – third base.
These days you still see an occasional “eephus” pitch, a slow blooper of a toss that can confound a batter who’s expecting a fastball.
The eephus forever lives in baseball history for what happened in the 1946 All-Star game, when the Pirates’ Rip Sewell threw one to Boston’s Ted Williams – and Williams turned it into a three-run homer, to the amusement of the crowd and to Williams himself.
Why “eephus?” The term was coined by one of Sewell’s teammates, Maurice Van Robays, who said, “Eephus ain’t nothing, and that’s a nothing pitch.”
Some assert the word was derived from efes, which in Hebrew means “nothing,” but I’ll leave that one alone since Van Robays was neither Jewish nor a grammarian.
Speaking of the Red Sox, though, we dream this season that they’ll put up a lot of what baseball calls “crooked numbers” – numbers greater than 1 – in reversing recent fortunes that left them finishing last.
One can only hope, because anything less would be, well… a major league kick in the tush.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net). a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
