On a talk show today someone wondered what the opposite of "player's coach" would be. Suddenly I perked up...a word question on a sports show?! Yet I wondered about their selection; they all agreed that the opposite would be "taskmaster."

I assume there isn't a real antonym for "player's coach," and they were just doing their best. Still, isn't there something better?

Coach's protege?

Sports has a rich vernacular, but even amongst the announcers, they tend not to use "big" words. Considering the length of sports broadcasts, you'd think there would be some lengthy words slip in if the announcers knew them, something like "indefatigable" might come up.

The best I can come up with is "ballbuster". Of course, "player's coach" to me doesn't mean a coach who is easy on the players. It means a coach who treats the game as if he were a player, typically a former player. Often this means going easy on the players in practices and workouts, but at the professional level, all of these guys are going all out, so the definition is something different.

Not sports really, but on a poker show, a player was talking about an "internet meme" which had become a "shibboleth" among people who disliked a certain player. The hosts of the show were terribly confused.

Shucks, I'm confused! What's an internet meme? I recognize "meme" as French for "same."

quote:

What's an internet meme?

According to Richard Dawkins, the biologist who coined the term, a meme is "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation". It's a cross between an idea and a gene and seemingly the idea replicates on its own. See also: Google definition.

[Fixed typo of omission.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

A good example of a meme is "all your base are belong to us", which has been around for a long time now, more than a decade, and is still referenced frequently.

An internet meme is simply a meme that makes its way around the internet, usually a joke, a quote, or a reference to something, all of which occur everywhere else on the internet.

What a synchronicity! I started litening to The Laziest Men on Mars' Invasion of the Gabber Robots just before reading this thread.

I thought an internet meme was a blog term for those quizzes you take that supposedly tell something about you - like "which TV mom is most like you" or something?

More likely is the quizzes are an example of an internet meme, although they don't fit the category too precisely.