No matter how long you’ve been playing golf, you probably know that when your partner describes your shot as a screaming low duck hook into the trees, it’s not good.
We like our shots to be stiff, pure, flush.
Slice, wormburner, shank? Not so much.
But from there, golf terminology starts to get complicated. Test your comprehension by reviewing this collection of words and phrases from the language we hear on the links.
Here are some good starter terms.
Air Mail: You’re approaching the green with one of your wedges and make such a fantastic swing – or huge misjudgment – that the ball carries over the green. You’ve just air mailed it.
Banana Ball: The fellows from Savannah haven’t trademarked this term so it still applies to a rather low and severely curving golf shot. Nothing to sing and dance about, unless the hole has a dogleg you’ve just banana’d around!
Chili Dip: It sounds kind of yummy but leaves a bad taste in every golfer’s mouth. You’ve got a short chip but you chunk it, hitting the ground and moving your ball just a few inches forward. Now your question might be, why chili dip and not bean or crab dip? Hmmm.
Foot Wedge: Your ball is stuck behind a tree and no one is looking, so you use your foot wedge to improve your lie. Older golfers who remember the greatest soccer player who ever lived might call this a Pele. Others might just call it cheating.
Member Bounce: Your pulled approach shot lands on the cart path off to the left of the green, then it mysteriously ricochets to 3 feet from the hole. If you’re a member of the club, you can say you planned it that way. If not, you just had a member bounce.
“You Linda Ronstadted me.” This compliment might raise some quizzical eyebrows belonging to young people who haven’t heard the gifted vocalist’s version of “Blue Bayou.” In golf, that is spelled “Blew by you,” referring to a tee shot that blows past the well-struck ball already out in the fairway.
“Run, Forrest, run.” Your drive or approach shot is a little bit low but the fairway is firm and all could end well if the ball will run the way Tom Hanks did in “Forrest Gump.”
“That second guy always makes the putt.” That second guy or gal is you taking a mulligan or practice shot after you’ve messed up, and he or she always seems to do better than you the first time. One woman I played with said her instructor told her to let the second gal swing first.
“Those guys are really ham and egging.” This is a compliment and an insult, because it insinuates you and your partner are lucky because when one of you has a bad hole, the other one has a good hole. I have never been sure whether it was better to be the ham or the egg but I do know it is the way to win a four-ball or best-ball match.
“You’re dancing, but he/she is ugly.” The green is considered to be the dance floor, so if your approach shot finds it, you’re dancing. If you’re not close to the pin, though, the extension of the metaphor says you’ve got an ugly dance partner.
Baby Boomers and longtime golfers, recent rules updates and format changes have kicked a few phrases to the curb. Use these and expect to be corrected by a savvy youngster:
Water Hazard: The most recent rules simplifications erased these from our vocabulary. These still exist, splash, but now fall under the general umbrella (get it?) of the Penalty Area.
All Square: You and your old pal can still exclaim, “The match is all square!” when one of you has tied up your game, but at the Ryder and Solheim Cups nowadays the match is simply tied. The same goes for, “The hole is halved.” There’s no more halving.
Casual Water: That place where you might have thought you should wear your flip flops has been renamed. Sound like the coolest golfer in your foursome by noting that the bunker has “Temporary Water.” We still get a free drop, but this new term is probably more accurate here in Colorado, where that bunker will dry out by this afternoon.
Dormie: Use this term with a 20-something and they’ll be wondering where you went to college. Rules officials typically applied the label to a match in which one player led by the number of holes remaining, meaning that player could do no worse than tie. It’s gone the way of the brassie, the niblick and the mashie – except that all of the latter live on in Colorado as popular CGA tournaments!
Trap: A rules expert I know tells me the leaders of the game wanted to soften the language of the rules, so they eliminated the terms “hazard” and “trap.” Unfortunately, finding one’s ball in a bunker, like a penalty area, is no less nasty than the old term.
Phrases To Be AvoidedElena King, ExperienceGolf academy founder and a student of mind training for golf, suggests avoiding calling ourselves names such as “idiot,” “dummy” and “loser.” She says self-talk can create confidence, but this kind undermines it.
High handicappers playing with scratch golfers probably should not ever say, “Nice shot” unless the ball lands next to or in the hole. That’s because the scratch golfer will likely give you the “you don’t know what you’re talking about” look. We all have our own definitions of a good shot, right?
You know how you’re not supposed to tell a performer “good luck” and instead have to say “break a leg”? There’s a similar superstition associated with “shank,” a golf shot that screams low off to the right of a right-handed golfer because it hit the club hosel, not the face. Just don’t say it – it could be contagious.
Finally, in golf, it’s considered good manners to dispense with other four-letter words. Take the Tiger Woods vocabulary clinic and replace them with niceties such as “Fudge” and “Shoot.” Or just say, “That’s GOLF!”
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