A Whole New Ballgame

American sports idioms and working in France

Dec 02, 2024

It’s days after Thanksgiving, and I’m still KO’d. We spent Thursday night hosting some of our favorite people, eating too much, then receding into the couch to digest. By dessert, we Americans were in full form, chatting a mile a minute, and sliding into our most natural dialect: sports idioms. The kind of language we usually use when we’re only among our own.

One of our French friends stared blankly as time out, no sweat, make the cut, and give it my best shot flew by. His eyes quietly gave the universal SOS stare.

We awkwardly started explaining the phrases. Then others in the room joined in, rattling off their favorite American sports idioms: “home run,” “take sides,” “put me in, coach,” “dive in headfirst.” We dissolved into laughter, realizing just how absurd—and how ingrained—these phrases are.

Football, baseball, basketball, golf, boating, boxing, horse racing and more pattern the way we talk about work, life, and everything in between.

Serving turkey at our Thanksgiving in Paris, 2024.

It was one of those goofy cultural moments that sneaks up on you when you’re living abroad. How unfiltered parts of your native language and way of being bump into someone else’s frame of reference.

My friends told me that, by my three-minute rule, I probably had to write about it here.

My favorite moment of being confronted by my native culture’s obsession with sports happened at my last job. I’d casually throw out phrases like more shots on goal or let’s touch base. I’d gripe about moving the goalposts or get excited and say, “And now we’re off to the races.”

Usually, I got blank stares.

I’d gently explain the context, much the way my colleagues often did for me in French, while quietly vowing to cut back on idioms and speak more clearly. The goal, after all, is to communicate and be understood.

But a few weeks later, in a meeting, one of my French colleagues said it back to me, in a very heavy accent: “We are off to the races!”

It was endearing and surreal—a little piece of America reflected back at me. A reminder that my presence there shapes the people around me just as much as they shape me.

At first, moments like that made me feel out of place, hyper-aware of how different I sounded, and convinced I’d never fully fit in. But now, they feel like playful exchanges—proof of the ways adapt and leave marks on each other.

In an international workplace, there’s a real kindness in simplifying one’s language to communicate. The goal is always clarity. My friend Amy, for instance, lets her colleagues speak to her in French while she responds in English. She’s nearly fluent in French but prefers the precision of her English for instructions or feedback. Everyone just wants to understand—and be understood.

But what I love about idioms is that they also telegraph the cultural quirks that shape us. In this case, our cultural obsession with sports and competition.

View from my last office in Paris in the 10th arr. 2023.

Below, you’ll find a long but by no means exhaustive list of sports idioms I’ve used (or awkwardly explained) at work here. Maybe it’ll make you laugh—or make you wonder what phrases you’ve unconsciously carried with you too.