With more than five minutes of playing time left in the first half of the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Cincinnati Bengals, I almost turned off the TV. I came this close. The Chiefs had an 18-point advantage, but more than that, they had the Bengals’ number. The Chiefs’ offense marched up and down the field at will. Their defense silenced the Bengals’ roar.I had the remote in my hand. I had a factoid in my head: Only 10 times in the decades-long history of the National Football League playoffs had teams overcome scoring deficits of the magnitude then confronting the Bengals. The odds of them rallying to beat the Chiefs and graduate to the Super Bowl were slim, so the case for continuing to watch the game was weak.And yet. The odds against the Bengals had been enormous at the start of the season, when pretty much no one picked them to come this far. They’d had a miserable 4-11-1 record the previous year and an even more miserable 2-14 record the year before that. They were grist for mockery, objects of pity, their tiger-stripe helmets a Potemkin show of fierceness — until September, when they started winning and then kept winning and headed down the heady road that would lead to this matchup against the consistently fearsome Chiefs.If the Chiefs came into the contest as a model of ruthless scoring efficiency, the Bengals arrived as a model of something less quantifiable and less classifiable but arguably more consequential. That something combines hope, perseverance and the distinctive confidence that comes from getting lucky breaks, taking advantage of them and outperforming expectations often enough that doing so again seems less a statistical long shot than destiny.It’s an ineffable amalgam. It exists apart from any literal-minded analysis of a player’s or team’s strengths and weaknesses. It ended up lifting the Bengals above the Chiefs. And it will power their victory over the Los Angeles Rams, another opponent that’s “better on paper,” in the Super Bowl on Sunday.It’s also what the winners of last year’s Super Bowl, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had. The Bucs’ appearance in the Bowl wasn’t nearly as big a surprise as the Bengals’ is, but they, too, had a season that exceeded most experts’ expectations. They, too, beat the odds. Tom Brady had joined the team, and the level of his play at quarterback was a specific, measurable upgrade.But to watch the Bucs then was to realize that something bigger and vaguer was happening. Brady’s presence tamped down the other players’ doubts about themselves and uncorked their dreams. It endowed them with a sense of specialness. It gave them an aura. It gave them faith.That faith: It’s part of so many great football stories, so many great sports stories. It’s present in the champion who bounces back from a supposedly career-ending injury, in the Olympian with a previously unthinkable tally of gold medals. It spawns a particular vocabulary, giving two nouns that begin with “m” a notably heavy workout.“It was a miracle finish fitting for a miracle season,” Charlie Goldsmith of the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote when the Bengals beat the Tennessee Titans in the final seconds to get to the American Football Conference championship game against the Chiefs. Yes, the Bengals’ defense had made crucial stands at key moments, and the Bengals’ young quarterback, Joe Burrow, had been a clutch hero once again. But neither factor fully explained the outcome, so out came “miracle,” even before the greater miracle that the Bengals proceeded to pull off by pulling even with the Chiefs and beating them in overtime.Put a string of miracles together and you a get a word that sportswriters and sports enthusiasts like even better: “momentum.” Momentum resides as much in the realm of superstition as in the world of science, so I’ll go a woo-woo step further with my “m” noun for what the Bengals possess, for what they’re touched by, for why they’ll prevail: It’s magic.
Words Worth Scrutiny: ‘Liar’ Versus … What?
“We have many words for people who lie,” Laurie Caplan, a reader from Astoria, Ore., wrote to me a few days ago, adding that her thesaurus brimmed with them. Mine, too: “liar,” “fibber,” “fabulist,” “prevaricator” and a dozen or so more. But, she said, “I can’t think of one word for people who tell the truth; we have to say an honest person, or a person with integrity, etc. I tried others, but ‘truth teller’ is two words.”What, she wondered, does that reveal about the English language and about the genuineness and strength of our supposed admiration for people who tell it to us straight?I’m not sure. Maybe nothing at all. This seems to be more a noun problem than an adjective problem and possibly a quirk. But her question and observation stuck with me because they sort of fit into a larger pattern, at least where so much news coverage and so many everyday conversations are concerned: We’re more mesmerized by and voluble about wrongdoing than we are about right-doing.And that’s not merely a corrective impulse, an attempt to eradicate such transgressions and warn people off them, lest they find themselves inducted into the hall of shame. There’s often a negative, pessimistic mind-set at play. There’s possibly schadenfreude in the mix.Whatever the reason, we’re frequently quicker to call out the bad actors than to congratulate the good ones — with exceptions. The Super Bowl. The Olympics. These events represent moments when we focus on the feats of which people are capable, and we have no shortage of words for those achievers. They’re winners. Champions. Heroes.“Words Worth Scrutiny” is a recurring feature. To suggest a term or phrase, please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.
For the Love of Lyrics
I said this feature would run about every five weeks but am bringing it back sooner than that because: wow. Hundreds of you have expressed your enthusiasm for it by nominating songwriters and songs. I’m delighted and grateful. And I’m holding on to your nominations so that I can showcase many of them over time.In the last installment, I praised Aimee Mann and noted her surprising rhymes. David Argentieri of Bennington, Vt., wrote in to say that I’d skipped over one of the best of these, at the start of her song “Save Me”:You look like a perfect fitFor a girl in need of a tourniquetBut Mann has plenty of competitors in the rhymes-you-don’t-see-coming sweepstakes. Anne Brown of Boston, Nan Tecotzky of Manhattan and Elaine Shute of Mount Desert, Maine, directed my attention to the songwriter Stephin Merritt and, in particular, his work with the band the Magnetic Fields, including the song “A Chicken with its Head Cut Off,” which begins by rhyming “eligible” with “intelligible” and “stupid” with “Cupid.”I flashed on a favorite Magnetic Fields song of mine, “You Must Be Out of Your Mind,” which, in its first verse, has these lines:I want you crawling back to meDown on your knees, yeahLike an appendectomySans anesthesiaCan “back to me” paired with “appendectomy” and “your knees, yeah” with “anesthesia” be topped? If so, perhaps it’s by the Bonnie Raitt hit “Thing Called Love,” written by the remarkable John Hiatt, who rhymes “Queen of Sheba” with “amoeba” in a fashion that makes complete sense. (Thanks to Dave Murray of Syracuse, N.Y., and Phil Oswald of Grand Marais, Minn., among others, for nominating Hiatt, and to Martha Menard of Blaine, Wash., for naming this song in particular.)At least 30 of you urged a few words of thanks and praise for another songwriter named John — John Prine, who died in 2020 of complications related to the coronavirus. His catalog is monumental, and it includes its own share of corny curveball rhymes, like this from “You Got Gold”:Life is a blessin’It’s a delicatessenOf all the little favors you doBut Prine was even better known as a master of metaphor and novelistic detail, as in “Sam Stone,” which includes this description of a veteran who becomes an injecting drug addict: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.”Prine was a poet of disenchantment, with the narrator of “Far from Me” noting that:We used to laugh togetherAnd we’d dance to any old songWell, you know, she still laughs with meBut she waits just a second too longOr, in “Paradise”:Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovelAnd they tortured the timber and stripped all the landWell, they dug for their coal till the land was forsakenThen they wrote it all down as the progress of man(Thanks to many of you, including Tim Kelly of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Spain; Judith Moran of Denver; and Kevin Geraghty of Boise, Idaho)“For the Love of Lyrics” appears monthly(ish). To nominate a songwriter and song, please email me here, including your name and place of residence. “For the Love of Sentences” will return next week; you can use the same link to suggest recent snippets of prose for it.
What I’m Reading/On a Personal Note (Special Combo!)
There are circumstances in this life that are all good or all bad. There are wellsprings of unalloyed happiness, and there are sources of undiluted despair. But they’re the uncomplicated exceptions. The bulk of our existences is 50 million shades of gray.And that’s what my friend Heather Havrilesky acknowledges so wittily and well in her new book, “Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage,” which was published just this week. Heather moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., from the Los Angeles area around the same time last summer as my own move here from Manhattan. We’d never met, but one of our mutual friends, Kerry Lauerman, pressed each of us on the other. Heather came over for wine. I think I even rallied to put out some cheese and crackers. We traded journalism war stories. We swapped confidences. Afterward, we texted and made a vow: That won’t be the last time. And it wasn’t.An excerpt from “Foreverland” that The Times published in late December drew significant attention, including from you. Marcia Watt of Skaneateles, N.Y., emailed me to praise the prose in Heather’s assertion that “surviving a marriage requires turning down the volume on your spouse so you can barely hear what they’re saying. You must do this not only so you don’t overdose on the same stultifying words and phrases within the first year, but also so your spouse’s various grunts and sneezes and snorts and throat clearings don’t serve as a magic flute that causes you to wander out the front door and into the wilderness, never to return.”John Langmore of Austin, Tex., tipped his hat to Heather’s description of the moments when her husband, Bill, a university professor, becomes a caricature of his occupation: “And then our dashing hero begins to hold forth on ‘the learning sciences’ — how I hate that term! — and he quickly wilts before my eyes into a cursed academic, a cross between a lonely nerd speaking some archaic language only five other people on earth understand and a haunted ice cream man, circling his truck through the neighborhood in the dead of winter, searching for children.”On social media, some people took exception to Heather’s unvarnished appraisal of Bill. They felt she’d humiliated him. I didn’t. I saw the humor and intentional hyperbole at play — and the love beneath the laments. I assumed that Bill had consented to the portrait. And I understood that to de-romanticize marriage, Heather had to de-romanticize the person to whom she’s married.She later told me: “Most people are very careful about what they’ll tell you about their marriages. I’m proud of my marriage on so many levels, and I think that shows in my book. But the last thing I’d want is to brag about the good stuff without dipping into the dark nights of the soul.” Her portrait of Bill, she added, was as much a portrait of herself — of how grumpy a wife she can be. And Bill was indeed fine with her putting it all out there. The excerpt is from “one of his favorite chapters of the book,” she said.To strip away artifice is to let go of fear: There are fewer secrets to be guarded, less chance of exposure. And nobody can come along and shatter your illusions if you’ve taken a hammer to them yourself. Doing so is the essence of creative destruction: The shards around you become jigsaw pieces that you fit together until they take the shape of a contentment that’s real and durable. In the puzzle of my own life — and, I’d wager, in Heather’s — one color predominates. It’s gray.