Any announcer that has worked a long baseball season knows that one of the big challenges of broadcasting a lengthy baseball schedule is keeping your vocabulary fresh. I’m not necessarily talking about figuring out different ways to describe a ground ball or a fly ball, but instead expanding your overall vocabulary.
When I was broadcasting for the Tigers, our traveling secretary, Bill Brown, was always challenging me to add new words to my vocabulary toolbox. Bill was a slick wordsmith and would often make sure to let me know if I had misused a word or phrase on the air.
I remember during one road trip, Brown challenged me to use the word “tautological” during a broadcast. He said it in jest, but I eventually looked up its meaning. While I never used it on the air, it did get me into the habit of learning new words and incorporating them into the broadcast. If you’re wondering, tautological means needlessly repetitive without adding clarity. For instance. the phrase, “It is what it is” is a tautological statement.
What I began to do is create a document of words that I encountered in my daily reading. If I didn’t know the meaning or had a vague understanding of a word, I would grab the dictionary and look up it’s meaning. I found that this allowed me to learn different ways to add words to the broadcast to keep it fresh. Over the course of a 162-game schedule, avoiding repetition becomes a challenge. You are describing plays and situations that you have seen over and over. Finding a way to add some flair to your language can breathe some life into the broadcast.
However, you do have to be careful not to fill a broadcast with too many flowery words or language that flys over the head of the average listener or viewer. People tune in to a broadcast to relax and listen to a game, not for an English lesson. Yet, sprinkling in a new descriptor here and there can punch up a broadcast.
Some of my favorite words that are not commonly used in everyday language that I would sprinkle into a broadcast include majestic, or prodigious (used to describe a towering home run), electrifying (to describe a flashy player), and histrionics (to describe a manager arguing a play.). These are just a few examples of doing a little digging into the vocabulary archive to switch it up a bit.
A word of caution though. Be careful not to become someone your are not. I was never going to convince anyone that I earned a doctorate in English. People would be able to see right through that. I simply wanted to add a different take on common words or phrases to liven the broadcast.
