Gary Carter left a lasting legacy in the world of baseball. And now posthumously, Carter has now left a lasting legacy in the language we use:
The term “F-bomb” surfaced in newspapers more than 20 years ago but will land Tuesday for the first time in the mainstream Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, along with sexting, flexitarian, obesogenic, energy drink and life coach. So who’s responsible for lobbing F-bomb far and wide? Kory Stamper, an associate editor for Merriam-Webster, said she and her fellow word spies at the Massachusetts company traced it back to 1988, in a Newsday story that had the now-dead Mets catcher Gary Carter talking about how he had given them up, along with other profanities.
How cool is this: the guy who was famous for living clean and having a clean mouth made it into Webster’s Dictionary with a profanity euphemism. I would have guessed that Lenny Dykstra would have been the one to invent a cuss word. I guess you really can’t predict baseball, Suzyn.
(Credit to David McLain and Jonah Keri for finding this gem.)
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