Stengelese Spoken Here
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
Stengelese Spoken Here
The long and winding big-league baseball season started this week. Every year at this time we profile a baseball immortal who is equally celebrated for his unorthodox language skills. The choice this year is Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel (1890-1975), who at the age of fifty-eight became manager of the mighty New York Yankees and took them to ten World Series in twelve years.
Casey Stengel broke into the major leagues in 1912 and played for fourteen seasons. He later said, “I had many years that I was not so successful as a ballplayer, as it is a game of skill.”
As player and manager, Casey was for decades baseball’s class clown—but a lot of snooty Yankees fans thought he was a no-class clown and opposed his hiring. They weren’t alone. Boston sportswriter Dave Egan’s reaction to the new manager: “The Yankees have now been mathematically eliminated from the 1949 pennant race.”
Instead, Stengel guided the Bronx Bombers to five straight World Series championships (1949-53), a baseball record that may never be broken.
Casey spoke a dialect of English called “Stengelese,” utterances that concealed nuggets of wisdom in a dense matrix of dizzying gibberish. “Stengelese was mostly a public act,” said sportswriter Maury Allen. “He double-talked in part to diffuse pinpoint questions.” An extreme example: “He’s the perdotious quotient of the qualificatilus.”
Stengel seasoned his speech with trademark words and phrases, one favorite being “at the present time,” which he’d drop in anywhere: “Most people my age are dead at the present time.” He also found creative ways to use “fairly,” as in: “This club plays better baseball now. Some of them look fairly alert.”
Some Stengelese could be harsh. On a player’s lack of potential: “He’s only twenty years old and with a good chance in ten years of being thirty.” On another player’s batting prowess: “He couldn’t hit the ground if he fell out of an airplane.” On managing twenty-five men successfully: “Keep the five guys who hate you from the five who are undecided.”
The baseball lifestyle, with its constant travel and unsupervised free time, has ended many a promising career, but Stengel came to believe in players who could hold their liquor: “I have found that ones who drink milk shakes don’t win many ball games.” “We are in such a slump that even the ones that are drinking aren’t hitting.” “Look at him. He don’t smoke. He don’t drink. He don’t chase women. And he don’t win.”
In 1958, Stengel appeared before Senator Estes Kefauver’s U.S. Senate subcommittee on baseball’s antitrust status. Here is one exchange:
Kefauver: I was asking you, sir, why it is that baseball wants this bill passed.
Stengel: I would say I would not know, but would say the reason why they would want it passed is to keep baseball going as the highest paid ball sport that has gone into baseball and from the baseball angle. I am not going to speak of any other sport. I am not here to argue about other sports. I am in the baseball business. It has been run cleaner than any business that was ever put out in the 100 years at the present time. I am not speaking about television or I am not speaking about income that comes into the ball parks. You have to take that off. I don’t know too much about it. I say the ballplayers have a better advancement at the present time.
That’s quite an oration. Most of us would have quit talking after the first seven words.
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Thanks for a pleasant change-up!
Your article on “Stengelese” was classic, so I sent it on to many of my friends who appreciate such stuff. Thanks a bunch.