I coulda hit it harder, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone.
Dear Word Detective: I’ve heard the term “blooper” before, as a filmed or videotaped “mistake” or miscue, often run as a sidebar to a film’s final credits for, optimistically, extra laughs. But since the 2006 MLB season began, I’ve been hearing commentators for the Mets, Yankees, and ESPN use the word “blooper” to describe a base hit that drops “in” in front of the fielder. In a way this kind of “blooper” is a mistake for the defense, but it’s certainly not a bad thing for the player who gets on base. What do you think — and how did we get the word “blooper” to begin with? — Aunt Shecky.
“MLB,” I presume, means Major League Baseball, and here goes another year I forgot to watch baseball. But I wear my trusty Yankees cap nearly every day. As a guy in a New Yorker cartoon a few years ago put it, “Actually, I’m not a New York Yankees fan. I’m a New York Yankees cap fan.”
It appears that the sense of “blooper” meaning “mistake,” especially a public and embarrassing faux pas, has an origin separate from that of the baseball kind of “blooper.” There seem to be two possible sources for the “mistake” sense. In the early days of radio, a poorly shielded receiver could actually generate a signal that would interfere with other receivers nearby, causing the other sets to emit a howling or “bloop” sound. Such sets came to be known as “bloopers,” and it is possible that the “mistake” sense came from this sudden, unpleasant and unwanted radio noise. But during the same period, sound engineers splicing film soundtracks invented a way of covering the splices, called a “blooping patch,” that prevented the film from making unwanted noises when the splice passed through the projector. Since a error in recording would call for such a splice, it is possible that “blooper” in the “error” sense comes from this process.
The baseball sort of “blooper,” a ball hit high but weakly so that it just clears the infield and hits the ground short of the outfield, has a more certain origin. The term is echoic, imitative of the soft “bloop” sound of the bat striking the ball (as opposed to the sharp crack of a more powerful hit). “Blooper” can also mean a pitch lobbed high so as to drop through the strike zone.
