Friday, August 10, 2012

Jones Introduces Twitter World to "Chipperish"


When Atlanta Braves superstar third baseman Chipper Jones joined the social media world of Twitter a few weeks ago few probably could’ve foreseen that the slugger would actually introduce the world to a brand new language. A language that an MLB.com article has dubbed “Chipperish.”

In his early tweets Chipper would use strange words such as “yicketty” and “mammo” when describing his team’s play.

For example this early tweet from July 25: “Mike b and jhey go yicketty! The roadrunner went mammo! And the Bravos have a winning road trip. My kind of day off, no action!!!”

Jones would later explain to confused Twitter followers that “yicketty” was slang for home run and “mammo” slang for a “big bomb”, which is actually slang in itself.   

Baseball is certainly no stranger to slang terms and likely has more slang than any other sport, maybe even most other sports combined. Among my favorite baseball lingo terms are Uncle Charlie and yakker, which are both references for a curveball.

There are more terms for a home run than any other statistic or play in baseball like: dinger, blast, four-bagger, moon shot, tater and on and on, but it seems “yicketty” and “mammo”, likely created by Chipper Jones, that great linguist himself, are the ones that he prefers to use. It’ll be interesting to see if those terms catch on around the game, it already appears that they have among Chipper’s teammates with multiple Braves players also using the terms on Twitter and Braves announcers even using the terms during broadcasts.

It shall be interesting to see if “Chipperish” ever becomes as popular in the baseball or even pop culture lexicon as legendary New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra’s “Yogisms”.

Which leads me to a few of my favorite “Yogisms” …

*"Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical."

*"The future ain't what it used to be"

*"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

*"I didn't really say everything I said." … Which is probably very true. 




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