Last week, the world lost a great man.
This was a man who managed to get three remarkable careers into one lifetime. This was a man who moved millions of Americans over decades. And this was a man who enriched the English language considerably – in fact, to a degree much larger than the vast majority of English speakers, native or other, ever realised, at least until they read his obituaries.
I am, of course, talking about Lawrence Peter Berra. He died, aged 90, on 22 September 2015.
Assessing the impact of his death on America, The Financial Times wrote it “robs the country of one of its most distinctive sporting and cultural icons”.
Lawrence Who? His story goes as follows.
Born on 12 May 1925 in The Hill, the Italian enclave of St. Louis, Missouri, as the fourth of five children of immigrants from outside Milan, young Lawrence Berra dropped out of school after eighth grade at the age of fifteen, essentially to play baseball. Known as Laudie as a boy because his mother couldn’t pronounce his given name, he became famous under another acquired name which may ring a bell – Yogi Berra.
There are at least two different versions that explain how he came by his immortal nickname – one saying a team mate in amateur baseball coined it because he looked like a Hindu yogi when sitting with his arms and legs crossed in the locker room, sad after losing a game; the other story claiming as the source friends with whom he was watching a travelogue about India at the movies where a Hindu yogi sat cross-legged the way Berra would sit on the ground waiting for his turn at bat.
Either way, it stuck.
After seeing some serious action in the Navy during World War II, Berra returned to the States and became one of the greatest baseball players of all times, starting for both the New York Yankees (for 19 years) and the New York Mets (for one year) at the physically most demanding position of all, catcher – that’s the guy crouching behind the batsman and guiding his pitcher tactically as to where and how to throw the ball.
Among his countless exploits and records, in my humble view one achievement stands out: in Game 5 of the 1956 final national championship match-ups which the Americans modestly call the World Series (but then, outside of the U.S. of A there isn’t that much quality baseball being played) against the Brooklyn Dodgers, he caught The Perfect Game, with not one batsman even reaching first base. The grainy photo of him jumping into Yankees pitcher Don Larsen’s arms documents sports history – it is to this day the only Perfect Game in World Series history.
When reporters came to talk to him afterwards, Berra greeted them with the words, “So, what’s new?”
To quote the FT again, “as a catcher he was unequalled in his time, a born psychologist in handling pitchers with fragile egos and possessed of great quickness behind the plate and a fine throwing arm”. Who would have thought this newspaper could rise to such levels of ringing prose in commenting on something as profane as American professional sports?
All in all, in the course of his career, which he continued as a successful coach and manager, he appeared in 21 World Series championships, winning 13 of them, ten as a player – an unrivalled achievement.
Of course, you don’t do this just with a certain amount of talent and a lot of hard work. You also have to have that uncompromising winning mentality, that absolute rejection of even the concept of defeat, and that total refusal of accepting injustice at the hand of referees or, in baseball terms, umpires.
Berra had them all in abundance. In the 1955 World Series, also against the Dodgers, an umpire call went against him, and he threw an on-field tantrum that remains as unequalled as his career records. More than 50 years later, he signed a photograph of the scene for Barack Obama, writing, “Dear Mr. President, he was out!”
Well, those of you not really all that much interested in baseball will say, that’s very nice, but what’s the big deal, why the big fuss, and where’s the basis for the FT’s claim Yogi Berra was “a cultural icon”?
This is where the “Yogi-isms” come into it.
Because Berra was not just an outstanding athlete, he was also A Man of Words, who coined many phrases we all know and use, but don’t realise he was the author of. And no, he was not a 20th century reincarnation of Shakespeare, more of a modern-day “fool savant” – the court jester who sees things differently, has deeper insights that escape everybody else, and therefore comes out with pronouncements that at first appear absurd but actually make you stop and think: “somehow both nonsensical and sagacious... the Yogi-isms testified to a character – goofy and philosophical, flighty and down to earth – that came to define the man.” (The New York Times)
The top three are probably:
“It ain’t over till it’s over.”
“It’s like déjà-vu all over again.”
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
But then, there are so many more, prompting Berra to publish a collection in 1998 entitled The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! Here’s a sample, in no particular order:
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.”
“You can observe a lot just by watching.”
“The future ain’t what it used to be.”
“Baseball is 90 per cent mental and the other half is physical.”
“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”
“He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.”
“Even Napoleon had his Watergate.”
“We made too many wrong mistakes.”
“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”
“You should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”
“If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.”
And, finally, of a popular restaurant he stopped visiting, he said:
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
In 1958, Yogi Berra inspired the launch of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Yogi Bear. The rest is comics history…
Based on his style of speaking, Yogi was named "Wisest Fool of the Past 50 Years" by The Economist magazine in January 2005. Now there’s an accolade!
Bottom line, Yogi Berra had A Way with Words that in its inimitable manner influenced everyday American language by creating widely used colloquialisms and, more importantly, won him the hearts and minds of his compatriots.
In the immortal words [sic!] of the eponymous Bee Gees song of 1968:
You think that I don’t even mean
A single word I say
It’s only words, and words are all I have
To take your heart away
This is the Holy Grail, what many a politician, author, or journalist – crafters of language, dealers in language, accessories to language – consciously strives for but may never achieve.
But then, I guess there’s something to be said for authenticity, spontaneity, and credibility:
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” Stephen King
Declaration of interest: I am the biggest fan of Stephen King this side of the Mississippi. After he was badly injured in 1999 when hit by a car walking down a quiet country road in Maine where he lives, he took the time of his physical healing to write a book about his profession, On Writing (2000) which gives valuable insights into his thinking.
Stephen King’s œuvre is prolific; so much so that he has often been dismissed as a serious author based solely on the fact that he publishes about a book a year – surely that can’t be quality work. He has recently responded to this criticism in a piece he wrote for the weekend edition of The New York Times, and I find it makes for very interesting reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/opinion/stephen-king-can-a-novelist-be-too-productive.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20150828
When asked why he writes, King replies: "The answer to that is fairly simple—there was nothing else I was made to do. I was made to write stories and I love to write stories. That's why I do it. I really can't imagine doing anything else and I can't imagine not doing what I do."
In a nutshell, he argues, he has an obligation to write as much as he can in the course of his lifetime as this is what he does best and therefore owes to the rest of the world. Brought up to adhere to the Protestant Work Ethics, I can personally relate to that.
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Theodore Roosevelt
In what I do for a living – infinitely less important, impactful, or glamorous of course than being the most widely published author on this planet – words and language, written and spoken (no, not sung, I leave that to The Bee Gees and others), are also the one tool I have to succeed as I am not blessed with any additional outstanding gifts such as being able to catch a baseball better than anybody else.
I did play football for most of my (younger) years, but always with more enthusiasm than talent. Boringly consistent, some would say.
A bit of thinking helps – critical, analytical, and on a good day, creative – but eventually it must be translated into language that will resonate with interlocutors, audiences, stakeholders.
Very conscious of this, I am equally sensitive to language and both its usage and abusage.
I’m a stickler for vocabulary, grammar, and orthography.
And I suffer.
I currently bemoan the death of the accusative case – as in, “If you have a question, please contact Bill or I.” Whom do you contact? Surely Bill or me!
I also witness with a sad heart the demise of the adverb – as in, “Drive safe.” It’s “Be safe”, but “Drive safely”. This applies equally to adverbs characterising adjectives – as in “boringly consistent” (see above).
Last but not least, as I’m writing this I am not “sat” at my desk – I am sitting! To sit is not a transitive verb (you can only seat somebody, but not sit them; at best I could be seated at my desk), so please use the active form of the present participle to describe an activity happening as we speak, so to speak.
Don’t get me started…
Anyhow, there are rare occasions when orators rise to the same, and a recent one was the speech that Barack Obama – who, you remember, got the autographed photo from Yogi Berra – gave on 26 June 2015 at the funeral of Pastor Clementa C. Pinckney, also a Democratic South Carolina State Senator, who had been killed a few days earlier along with eight members of his congregation by a white supremacist with a gun. The President’s eulogy will be remembered not least because in the course of it he sang the opening lines of “Amazing Grace”.
But even without this added attraction, the speech is a gem – do check it out.
This is where you can read it:
www.postandcourier.com/assets/pdf/CP13381626.pdf
And here you can watch it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK7tYOVd0Hs
37 minutes of your time well spent, I think.
Apart from the content and sentiment of the eulogy, it is interesting for its structure and the way Barack Obama – or his speech writer(s) – make us of a style element those that know me a little better will by now be intimately familiar with – The Rule of Three.
In a little over half an hour, there are 25 or so instances of tricolon – arranging things in groups of three to make a point.
Modern-day psychologists have found the human brain works in sets of three. Most people, I for one, can’t remember more than three items at a time, and we are swayed to buying-into an argument if it is developed in three steps.
Long before science verified this phenomenon, the most successful speakers and authors knew it and used the tricolon rhetorical device to drive home their messages:
“Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) Plutarch, Life of Caesar 50; Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Iulius 37.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears / I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, 2 (1599)
"We cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow..." Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (19 November 1863)
"… with malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right..." Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1865)
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Winston Churchill, Address to British Parliament (20 August 1940)
On that day in June, Barack Obama managed to win the hearts and minds of his audience not just in the TD Arena at the College of Charleston, but across the United States and beyond. Whether the impact of his speech will be long-lasting enough to sway Congress to restrict “the right to bear arms” remains to be seen – on that account, I am sceptical. Words can move mountains, but not necessarily do away with the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution or the might of the National Rifle Association.
My guess is that Obama would possibly trade some of his bigger achievements in eight years of Office for a meaningful Gun Control Act, but as we say in German – Life doesn’t do requests.
The funeral service for Yogi Berra took place on 28 September in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Montclair, New Jersey, the town where he and his family had lived for more than half a century. It was presided over by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York.
In his eulogy, Cardinal Dolan went so far as to invoke another son of an Italian immigrant father whose company he had recently enjoyed, Pope Francis. Cardinal Dolan compared their humble beginnings, “aw-shucks attitudes” and, playfully, the size of their ears.
He even dropped in references to Berra sayings when speaking of the catcher’s relationship with God. “There is no fork in the road on that journey, and that life ain’t never over,” he said.
The headline of The New York Times article reporting on the event summed up the general sentiment: “Person, Not Player, Is the Main Focus at Yogi Berra’s Funeral”.
In his memorable speech for Pastor Clementa Pinckney, Barack Obama summarised the deceased as follows:
“What a good man. Sometimes I think that's the best thing to hope for when you're eulogized -- after all the words and recitations and resumes are read, to just say someone was a good man.”
RIP, Yogi Berra. And thank you!
I am, of course, talking about Lawrence Peter Berra. He died, aged 90, on 22 September 2015.
Assessing the impact of his death on America, The Financial Times wrote it “robs the country of one of its most distinctive sporting and cultural icons”.
Lawrence Who? His story goes as follows.
Born on 12 May 1925 in The Hill, the Italian enclave of St. Louis, Missouri, as the fourth of five children of immigrants from outside Milan, young Lawrence Berra dropped out of school after eighth grade at the age of fifteen, essentially to play baseball. Known as Laudie as a boy because his mother couldn’t pronounce his given name, he became famous under another acquired name which may ring a bell – Yogi Berra.
There are at least two different versions that explain how he came by his immortal nickname – one saying a team mate in amateur baseball coined it because he looked like a Hindu yogi when sitting with his arms and legs crossed in the locker room, sad after losing a game; the other story claiming as the source friends with whom he was watching a travelogue about India at the movies where a Hindu yogi sat cross-legged the way Berra would sit on the ground waiting for his turn at bat.
Either way, it stuck.
After seeing some serious action in the Navy during World War II, Berra returned to the States and became one of the greatest baseball players of all times, starting for both the New York Yankees (for 19 years) and the New York Mets (for one year) at the physically most demanding position of all, catcher – that’s the guy crouching behind the batsman and guiding his pitcher tactically as to where and how to throw the ball.
Among his countless exploits and records, in my humble view one achievement stands out: in Game 5 of the 1956 final national championship match-ups which the Americans modestly call the World Series (but then, outside of the U.S. of A there isn’t that much quality baseball being played) against the Brooklyn Dodgers, he caught The Perfect Game, with not one batsman even reaching first base. The grainy photo of him jumping into Yankees pitcher Don Larsen’s arms documents sports history – it is to this day the only Perfect Game in World Series history.
When reporters came to talk to him afterwards, Berra greeted them with the words, “So, what’s new?”
To quote the FT again, “as a catcher he was unequalled in his time, a born psychologist in handling pitchers with fragile egos and possessed of great quickness behind the plate and a fine throwing arm”. Who would have thought this newspaper could rise to such levels of ringing prose in commenting on something as profane as American professional sports?
All in all, in the course of his career, which he continued as a successful coach and manager, he appeared in 21 World Series championships, winning 13 of them, ten as a player – an unrivalled achievement.
Of course, you don’t do this just with a certain amount of talent and a lot of hard work. You also have to have that uncompromising winning mentality, that absolute rejection of even the concept of defeat, and that total refusal of accepting injustice at the hand of referees or, in baseball terms, umpires.
Berra had them all in abundance. In the 1955 World Series, also against the Dodgers, an umpire call went against him, and he threw an on-field tantrum that remains as unequalled as his career records. More than 50 years later, he signed a photograph of the scene for Barack Obama, writing, “Dear Mr. President, he was out!”
Well, those of you not really all that much interested in baseball will say, that’s very nice, but what’s the big deal, why the big fuss, and where’s the basis for the FT’s claim Yogi Berra was “a cultural icon”?
This is where the “Yogi-isms” come into it.
Because Berra was not just an outstanding athlete, he was also A Man of Words, who coined many phrases we all know and use, but don’t realise he was the author of. And no, he was not a 20th century reincarnation of Shakespeare, more of a modern-day “fool savant” – the court jester who sees things differently, has deeper insights that escape everybody else, and therefore comes out with pronouncements that at first appear absurd but actually make you stop and think: “somehow both nonsensical and sagacious... the Yogi-isms testified to a character – goofy and philosophical, flighty and down to earth – that came to define the man.” (The New York Times)
The top three are probably:
“It ain’t over till it’s over.”
“It’s like déjà-vu all over again.”
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
But then, there are so many more, prompting Berra to publish a collection in 1998 entitled The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! Here’s a sample, in no particular order:
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.”
“You can observe a lot just by watching.”
“The future ain’t what it used to be.”
“Baseball is 90 per cent mental and the other half is physical.”
“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”
“He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.”
“Even Napoleon had his Watergate.”
“We made too many wrong mistakes.”
“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”
“You should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”
“If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.”
And, finally, of a popular restaurant he stopped visiting, he said:
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
In 1958, Yogi Berra inspired the launch of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Yogi Bear. The rest is comics history…
Based on his style of speaking, Yogi was named "Wisest Fool of the Past 50 Years" by The Economist magazine in January 2005. Now there’s an accolade!
Bottom line, Yogi Berra had A Way with Words that in its inimitable manner influenced everyday American language by creating widely used colloquialisms and, more importantly, won him the hearts and minds of his compatriots.
In the immortal words [sic!] of the eponymous Bee Gees song of 1968:
You think that I don’t even mean
A single word I say
It’s only words, and words are all I have
To take your heart away
This is the Holy Grail, what many a politician, author, or journalist – crafters of language, dealers in language, accessories to language – consciously strives for but may never achieve.
But then, I guess there’s something to be said for authenticity, spontaneity, and credibility:
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” Stephen King
Declaration of interest: I am the biggest fan of Stephen King this side of the Mississippi. After he was badly injured in 1999 when hit by a car walking down a quiet country road in Maine where he lives, he took the time of his physical healing to write a book about his profession, On Writing (2000) which gives valuable insights into his thinking.
Stephen King’s œuvre is prolific; so much so that he has often been dismissed as a serious author based solely on the fact that he publishes about a book a year – surely that can’t be quality work. He has recently responded to this criticism in a piece he wrote for the weekend edition of The New York Times, and I find it makes for very interesting reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/opinion/stephen-king-can-a-novelist-be-too-productive.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20150828
When asked why he writes, King replies: "The answer to that is fairly simple—there was nothing else I was made to do. I was made to write stories and I love to write stories. That's why I do it. I really can't imagine doing anything else and I can't imagine not doing what I do."
In a nutshell, he argues, he has an obligation to write as much as he can in the course of his lifetime as this is what he does best and therefore owes to the rest of the world. Brought up to adhere to the Protestant Work Ethics, I can personally relate to that.
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Theodore Roosevelt
In what I do for a living – infinitely less important, impactful, or glamorous of course than being the most widely published author on this planet – words and language, written and spoken (no, not sung, I leave that to The Bee Gees and others), are also the one tool I have to succeed as I am not blessed with any additional outstanding gifts such as being able to catch a baseball better than anybody else.
I did play football for most of my (younger) years, but always with more enthusiasm than talent. Boringly consistent, some would say.
A bit of thinking helps – critical, analytical, and on a good day, creative – but eventually it must be translated into language that will resonate with interlocutors, audiences, stakeholders.
Very conscious of this, I am equally sensitive to language and both its usage and abusage.
I’m a stickler for vocabulary, grammar, and orthography.
And I suffer.
I currently bemoan the death of the accusative case – as in, “If you have a question, please contact Bill or I.” Whom do you contact? Surely Bill or me!
I also witness with a sad heart the demise of the adverb – as in, “Drive safe.” It’s “Be safe”, but “Drive safely”. This applies equally to adverbs characterising adjectives – as in “boringly consistent” (see above).
Last but not least, as I’m writing this I am not “sat” at my desk – I am sitting! To sit is not a transitive verb (you can only seat somebody, but not sit them; at best I could be seated at my desk), so please use the active form of the present participle to describe an activity happening as we speak, so to speak.
Don’t get me started…
Anyhow, there are rare occasions when orators rise to the same, and a recent one was the speech that Barack Obama – who, you remember, got the autographed photo from Yogi Berra – gave on 26 June 2015 at the funeral of Pastor Clementa C. Pinckney, also a Democratic South Carolina State Senator, who had been killed a few days earlier along with eight members of his congregation by a white supremacist with a gun. The President’s eulogy will be remembered not least because in the course of it he sang the opening lines of “Amazing Grace”.
But even without this added attraction, the speech is a gem – do check it out.
This is where you can read it:
www.postandcourier.com/assets/pdf/CP13381626.pdf
And here you can watch it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK7tYOVd0Hs
37 minutes of your time well spent, I think.
Apart from the content and sentiment of the eulogy, it is interesting for its structure and the way Barack Obama – or his speech writer(s) – make us of a style element those that know me a little better will by now be intimately familiar with – The Rule of Three.
In a little over half an hour, there are 25 or so instances of tricolon – arranging things in groups of three to make a point.
Modern-day psychologists have found the human brain works in sets of three. Most people, I for one, can’t remember more than three items at a time, and we are swayed to buying-into an argument if it is developed in three steps.
Long before science verified this phenomenon, the most successful speakers and authors knew it and used the tricolon rhetorical device to drive home their messages:
“Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) Plutarch, Life of Caesar 50; Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Iulius 37.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears / I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, 2 (1599)
"We cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow..." Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (19 November 1863)
"… with malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right..." Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1865)
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Winston Churchill, Address to British Parliament (20 August 1940)
On that day in June, Barack Obama managed to win the hearts and minds of his audience not just in the TD Arena at the College of Charleston, but across the United States and beyond. Whether the impact of his speech will be long-lasting enough to sway Congress to restrict “the right to bear arms” remains to be seen – on that account, I am sceptical. Words can move mountains, but not necessarily do away with the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution or the might of the National Rifle Association.
My guess is that Obama would possibly trade some of his bigger achievements in eight years of Office for a meaningful Gun Control Act, but as we say in German – Life doesn’t do requests.
The funeral service for Yogi Berra took place on 28 September in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Montclair, New Jersey, the town where he and his family had lived for more than half a century. It was presided over by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York.
In his eulogy, Cardinal Dolan went so far as to invoke another son of an Italian immigrant father whose company he had recently enjoyed, Pope Francis. Cardinal Dolan compared their humble beginnings, “aw-shucks attitudes” and, playfully, the size of their ears.
He even dropped in references to Berra sayings when speaking of the catcher’s relationship with God. “There is no fork in the road on that journey, and that life ain’t never over,” he said.
The headline of The New York Times article reporting on the event summed up the general sentiment: “Person, Not Player, Is the Main Focus at Yogi Berra’s Funeral”.
In his memorable speech for Pastor Clementa Pinckney, Barack Obama summarised the deceased as follows:
“What a good man. Sometimes I think that's the best thing to hope for when you're eulogized -- after all the words and recitations and resumes are read, to just say someone was a good man.”
RIP, Yogi Berra. And thank you!
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