{"id":18616,"date":"2023-08-10T13:29:29","date_gmt":"2023-08-10T20:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18616"},"modified":"2023-08-10T13:30:06","modified_gmt":"2023-08-10T20:30:06","slug":"blocking-and-tackling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2023\/08\/10\/blocking-and-tackling\/","title":{"rendered":"Blocking and tackling"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I recently encountered this sentence in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2023\/08\/02\/broke-state-gop-parties-across-the-country-00109387\">news story<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>Traditionally, state parties perform the basic blocking and tackling of politics, from get out the vote programs to building data in municipal elections.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>I assumed that the phrase <i>blocking and tackling<\/i> was a slightly odd variation on <i><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Block_and_tackle\">block and tackle<\/a><\/i>, a system of pulleys and ropes.<\/p>\r\n<p>But then I realized that <i>blocking<\/i> and <i>tackling<\/i> are both things that are done in American football, and I thought maybe the phrase was sort of like an eggcorn\u2014someone hearing <i>block and tackle<\/i> used metaphorically, and assuming it had to do with football, and thus treating the words as verbs instead of nouns, and thus ennounifying them by adding <i>-ing<\/i> to each.<\/p>\r\n<p>Which was a fun theory as long as it lasted, but then I did a web search for <i>blocking and tackling<\/i> and discovered that <em>I<\/em> was the one who was making mistaken assumptions about phrase origins.<\/p>\r\n<p>Because American football coach Vince Lombardi apparently once said, \u201cFootball is two things. It's blocking and tackling.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>And so apparently the phrase <i>blocking and tackling<\/i> has come to be used, especially in business and politics, to refer to the basic unglamorous work that underpins the higher-profile work.<\/p>\r\n<p>I suppose this is more or less a phrase <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1997\/02\/23\/homomorphs\/\">homomorph<\/a>\u2014the two phrases look (almost) the same, but come from different roots.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[114,133,26,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eggcorns","category-homomorphs","category-etymology","category-metaphors"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18617,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18616\/revisions\/18617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}