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Brown Daily Herald Sports writer Anand Meyer '12 used his last known synonym for "win" in last month's coverage of the women's basketball team's recent "thwacking" of Cornell.
"I'm at a loss," said Meyer of his recent attempts to come up with a new term. "In other words, I'm annihilated, beat, crushed, defeated, embarrassed, flogged, gone, hindered, impeded, janked, knocked out, licked, massacred, neutralized, overwhelmed, pulverized, quelled, ruined, slaughtered, thrashed, undone, vanquished, whomped, x'd-out.y'know, zapped."
"And it's not just the headline verbs," he added. "There's only so many ways to refer to our team. Brown, the Bears, Bruno, Brunonians, B-town down in the Prov-prov zone. I've worn them all thin."
As a veteran writer and an attendee at countless sporting events and Herald info sessions, it seems Meyer has exhausted every possible approach to sports writing.
"I went through my sports-appropriate pun phase early on. 'Swim team drowns competition,' 'fencers foiled by Harvard,' 'slam dunk for women's basketball'." said Meyer. "'Equestrians trampled by Penn's stampeding hooves.'"
After his first semester, however, Meyer had to dig deeper. He began plucking words off the online thesaurus page for "win." "I think I was onto something with 'Water Polo Ensorcells Princeton' and 'Soccer Wangles Yale.' But my editor wasn't into it."
"For a while there I even tried just using sarcasm," Meyer continued. He read the Noser an excerpt from an article published last November: "Real astounding effort by the Crew team last Saturday. Their performance in that race was just sooooo great. The score must've been like 10 million to nothing, us. The crew team is sooooo strong this year. And that new coach has definitely given them a fresh new outlook. We absolutely haven't seen this strategy before. Definitely not the same tactics they used two weeks ago against Yale. Goooooo Brown."
After that November effort fell flat, Herald Sports Editor Anita Choi '12 advised Meyer to focus on straightforward reporting. "Each game is its own unique story," Choi said. "From the hockey defeat in which the players 'just weren't communicating 100%' to the basketball team that 'weren't speaking to each other out there on the court,' no two are alike."
Amid his struggle to find new words, however, Meyer has been reduced to recycling entire synopses of sports events from the Herald's archive. "It's not a big deal, as long as it's about the right sport," he said. "Actually my last football article was originally written about the women's volleyball team's 1985 Ivy tournament. But both teams were wearing shoulder pads, so I think it went over pretty well."
Indeed, many Herald readers said they did not notice Meyer's changes. "Sports articles are always boring," said Katie Conrad '12. "They're all the way at the end of the paper and no one reads them but athletes. Seriously, I'm pretty sure a newspaper could just print random words or make up quotes and no one would even quotes quotes quotes la la la la la la zippity do da dum. Happy National Pistachio Day everyone!"
