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Word Watch: Did Red Sox ‘Scuffle’ First Half of Season?

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Q: Recently I’ve heard several different baseball announcers use the word “scuffling” to describe a player or a team that’s struggling, e.g., “The Red Sox have really been scuffling the first half of the season.” I had never heard the word used that way before, and I wonder if you have any thoughts on this. — Karen Yardley via email

A: Yes. Never count out a late-season surge by the Sox!

We use “scuffle” most often to mean “to fight at close quarters, tussle,” as when angry baseball players shove or chest-bump one another.

But, according to Dickson’s Baseball Dictionary, managers and players also use “scuffling” to mean “to fail to perform up to standard, to be in a slump.”

The term first surfaced in baseball lingo during the 1970s and became a pet word of Tony La Russa when he managed the Oakland A’s in the 1980s and ’90s. It was further popularized by the Seattle Mariners, especially Bret Boone, during the 2003 season.

The term derives from a 19th-century meaning of “scuffle”: “to scratch out a living.” And speaking of scratching …

Q: In a psoriasis commercial on TV, one of the speakers pronounces the “t” in the word “often.” I was told in school to keep the “t” silent. Is this a regional pronunciation or a ploy in advertising to grab our attention by hearing this loud “t”? — Peter Waleszczyk, Terryville

A: Tonguing the “t” in “often” doesn’t appear to be regional. Linguists report this pronunciation in all areas of the U.S. And if this were a Mad Ave. sound-pop gimmick, the announcer would also punch the “p” in “psoriasis” just to make this ailment sound worse: “puh-sore-AYE-uh-sis.” Ick!

In fact, we can blame the dueling pronunciations of “often” on an unlikely suspect: literacy.

Until the 1500s, everyone pronounced the “t” in often. But then people began dropping hard consonant sounds from words, especially when those consonants piled up together like scuffling baseball players: “handsome” became “hansom”; “chestnut,” “chessnut”; and “raspberry,” “rasberry.” Likewise, “AWF-tin” became “AWF-in,” although its spelling remained “often.”

But during the early 1800s, some snobs began showing off their literacy by pronouncing certain words the same way they were spelled, restoring the “t” to “often.”

Although some pronunciation experts accept “AWF-tin,” to me it still bears a whiff of pretension, like lifting your pinky when you drink “t” . . . er, tea.