"His judgment could not be faltered"

In his INYT article on the Argentine footballer Javier Mascherano, Rob Hughes spends a lot of time talking about a key moment in the Holland-Argentina match the other day: Mascherano's tackle of Arjen Robben in the 90th minute, just before Robben was about to get a good shot on goal (his only one of the day?). He sums it up with a nice bit of understatement, but note also what he says at the beginning of this passage:

His judgment could not be faltered. His defenders had lost sight of Robben, his goalkeeper was frozen to his line, and everything depended on Mascherano’s timing that interception to perfection. A fraction either way, and he risked making contact with the Dutchman, who is known for his, shall we say, unsure footing in the penalty box.

Describing Robben's tendency to fall as dramatically as possible as "nnsure footing" made me laugh, but before I got to that, I had stopped at the first sentence here: "could not be faltered" sounds quite odd. 

First, I thought of this use of "falter" in terms of transitivity. "Falter" is usually an intransitive verb: "he faltered," but not "his opponent faltered him." As an intransitive verb, it cannot be used in the passive voice, as it is in Hughes's phrase: "be faltered." So I wondered if "falter" might be developing a transitive use: "they were unable to falter his judgment."

But then I did a search for the phrase "could not be faltered," and I found examples like this, mostly from travel websites where travel services of various kinds get evaluated: "The service, seats and leg room could not be faltered." This made me realize that I was dealing with an eggcorn, but it turns out to be one that is not listed in the Eggcorn Database. The standard expression that the eggcorn is based on is, of course, "could not be faulted."

I do wonder about the motivation for this one, though. One feature of many eggcorns is that the standard expression involves some oddity of usage, or an archaic word or image—something that a contemporary speaker may not be aware of. For example, "in cohorts with" instead of "in cahoots with": "A natural substitution for a word that only survives in frozen idiomatic usage, since one is typically in cahoots with one’s cohorts." But "faltered" for "faulted" does not seem like "a natural substitution" to me.

World Cup note, Group G

Everybody thinks that the only issue in Group G is whether Brazil or Portugal will be in first place after the games this afternoon. But here are the standings:

Team	MP	W	D	L	GF	GA	Pts
Brazil	2	2	0	0	5	2	6
Portugal	2	1	1	0	7	0	4
Côte d'Ivoire	2	0	1	1	1	3	1
Korea DPR	2	0	0	2	1	9	0

Yes, it's unlikely that the standings will change much, but given how helpless North Korea was against Portugal, and given how explosive the Ivory Coast can be, and given that the last time Brazil and Portugal played, Brazil won 6-2, it would not be completely and utterly miraculous (it would not be like a fifth set in tennis that goes to 70-68!) for the Ivory Coast to still qualify.

Let's say Brazil beats Portugal 3-0 (which is not an extreme result). Then the Ivory Coast has to win 6-0 (which is extreme, but as I said, not utterly unlikely, given NK's weakness and IC's offensive potential). That would put IC and P in a tie, and they would have to draw lots. So any nine-goal swing, with B and IC winning, makes it possible for IC to advance (7-1 for IC and 3-0 for Brazil would have IC advancing on goals scored, for example).

I do not, repeat DO NOT, think this is what's going to happen, but I thought I'd go on the record with it, just in case it does happen, so that I can pat myself on the back about it. :-)

Football and the Philosophers

There's an amusing column in the Basler Zeitung today in which Siegfried Schibli takes passages from famous philosophers and replaces one central word in each passage by the word "football." ("Soccer" to you American readers of this blog.)

The funniest one is from Schopenhauer: "Bisher subsumierte man den Begriff Fussball unter den Begriff Kraft: dagegen mache ich es gerade umgekehrt und will jede Kraft in der Natur als Fussball gedacht wissen. Man glaube ja nicht, dass dies Wortstreit, oder gleichgültig sei: vielmehr ist es von der allerhöchsten Bedeutsamkeit und Wichtigkeit. Denn dem Begriffe Kraft liegt, wie allen andern, zuletzt die anschauliche Erkenntnis der objektiven Welt, d. h. die Erscheinung, die Vorstellung, zum Grunde, und daraus ist er geschöpft." Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweites Buch, 1818. Das Wort "Wille" wurde durch "Fussball" ersetzt.

One could try to the same thing with poems:

"You gave me footballs first a year ago;
"They called me the football girl."
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Football garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

*

Let be be finale of seem.
The only football is the football of ice-cream.

*

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the footballer from the football?

*

SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a football,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

*

Shall I compare thee to a football match?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

*

Whither is fled the football's gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

*

For football, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ, I'll have these Players
Play something like the football of my father
Before mine uncle.

Football lines

A friend of mine just reminded me of this line from Gary Lineker:

"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end the Germans always win."

And that reminded me of the movie Lola rennt (Run Lola Run in English), in which one of the characters quotes the German trainer Sepp Herberger: "Der Ball ist rund, das Spiel dauert neunzig Minuten." In English, "the ball is round; the game lasts 90 minutes."

When Run Lola Run appeared in English, Stuart Klawans reviewed it in The Nation and concluded his review by citing the character's citation of Herberger: "Confronted with questions about meaning, a figure at the beginning of Run Lola Run shrugs and says, 'The ball is round. The game lasts ninety minutes.' That's a good answer, if your head's filled with the same stuff as the ball."

What struck me when I read that back in 1999 (when I still subscribed to The Nation) was that no German reviewer would ever make anything of that line. In the German, it will never be anything more than a throwaway line, a funny citation of Herberger that would at most lead to the ironic remark that the movie itself is 90 minutes long.

Sport and Art

George Szirtes wrote, in a comment about Ryan Giggs:

"It is hard to explain to those who have no taste for football that it can be exciting in exactly the same way as art can."

For me, it is the narratives in sport that make it so fascinating. I remember sporting events the way that I remember plays, novels, or movies that are successful because of their well-made plots. And within that, then, the moments of grace: Jerry Rice swerving around the sideline marker to score a touchdown in a Super Bowl back in the late eighties, for example (26-21 for the 49ers, if I remember correctly). That memory is not quite as vivid as the lip twitch that Kevin Spacey produces in The Usual Suspects (where the first time you see the movie, it means nervousness; and the second time, it means amusement) or the similar twitch Jennifer Ehle produces near the end of the BBC Pride and Prejudice (which to her family would mean she hates Mr. Darcy, while to the audience it means she loves him)—but I've seen each of those lip twitches several times, and I only saw Rice's touchdown once.