curveball
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Noun
[edit]curveball (plural curveballs)
- (baseball) A forespin pitch thrown by rotating the index and middle fingers down and resulting in motion down "curve"
- (by extension, chiefly US) An unexpected turn of events initiated by an opponent or chance; an exception or outlier.
- Synonym: twist
- Life has thrown him a few curveballs.
- 2015 March 10, David Sims, “Without Sam Simon, 'The Simpsons' Wouldn't Be What It Is Today”, in The Atlantic[1]:
- The season’s first episode, “Bart Gets an F,” got the highest ratings in its history, but “Treehouse of Horror” was the real curveball: a genre-busting effort that proudly punched above the show’s expectations.
- 2016 December 6, Spencer Kornhaber, “The Culture Wars in the Grammy Album Nominations”, in The Atlantic[2]:
- There are two curveball nominations, one perhaps a popularity bid and the other a credibility bid. The popular one is Bieber’s Purpose.
- 2017 June 13, Stephen Moss, “June likes to throw a curveball now and again”, in The Guardian[3]:
- But from time to time, June throws up a curveball, in the shape of unusual and hard to predict meteorological events.
- 2021 June 11, Ezra Klein, “Sam Altman on the A.I. Revolution, Trillionaires and the Future of Political Power” (32:37 from the start), in The Ezra Klein Show[4] (podcast), spoken by Sam Altman:
- And I think that’s an example of where faced with a seemingly intractable political reality, technology produces a solution that is a total curveball and not that imaginable a few decades ago.
Coordinate terms
[edit]- (baseball): fastball, hardball, slider, cut fastball, two-seam fastball, split-finger fastball, sinker, screwball, softball, knuckleball
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]pitch in baseball
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unexpected turn of events
See also
[edit]Verb
[edit]curveball (third-person singular simple present curveballs, present participle curveballing, simple past and past participle curveballed)
- (baseball) To throw a curveball.
- 2006, William F. McNeil, The Evolution of Pitching in Major League Baseball, McFarland, →ISBN, page 21:
- Even though the haughty physics professors at the elite school ridiculed his declaration that he could make a baseball curve, Cummings just laughed it off and said, “I curveballed them to death,” according to Frederick Ivor-Campbell.
- 2009, James Ellroy, Blood's a Rover, Random House, →ISBN, page 566:
- The news curveballed him. He'd been hamstrung and schizzed all the preceding weeks. He brooded in his den.
See also
[edit]Further reading
[edit]curveball on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
- “curveball n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present