Locker-Boxing/Helmets & Gloves/Bucket Fighting/Cage Match from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day at www.billcasselman.com

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other synonyms:“bucket fighting” and “cage match”

Locker-boxing. Here's a relatively new, odious term to add to the stewpot of Canadian sports lingo. This is the kind of activity encouraged by some of the bloated colostomy bags of egotism who parade on Canadian TV as sportscasters, heroes to young people. Check this enormity out, if you have a strong stomach.

Locker-boxing is prevalent across North America among minor-league hockey teams. Kids in a hockey locker room at a local rink or arena lock the door to adult coaches and beat the shit out of one another wearing hockey helmets and gloves.

The boy players and the girl players are under the delusion that helmets render their brains concussion-proof. They do not. Serious injury including possible paraplegia, cerebral traumata like subdural haematoma and lesions, fractured digits, severe dermal lacerations: all these horrors await young combatants. One Canadian emergency ward reported a thirteen-year-old boy who, after a minor game skirmish, had later come out of a locker-room shower to have his bare feet stepped on by another boy wearing ice skates.

Clinical trauma photographs depict a boy’s almost severed ear, due to a skate slash to his head, the sharp skate blade wielded by a fourteen-year-old hockey hero who had first ripped off his opponent’s helmet during the locker-room donnybrook.

The earliest print appearances of the term locker-boxing are in American newspapers, so its origin may be stateside.

Tiny camera-phones record these locker-room fight videos for broadcast on YouTube. Watch one of them. All-girl teams photograph their locker-boxing cat fights and lacrosse teams enjoy it also.

Don’t you love the lying, dithering hockey coaches who throw up their arms and lisp, “Gee, I didn’t know such unruly fisticuffs had marred the nobility of our sportive endeavours.” Or words to that effect. Actually, most coaches would not be capable of that much satiric pseudo-literacy. But what a useless coach! And what a load of crap! Coaches know well that, after a hockey game, these pubertal boys, flooded with testosterone and bug-eyed with adrenalin (hopefully not with illegal injections of Human Growth Hormone but---it does happen and sometimes the coach is the drug dealer), are looking for nothing better than a good, ass-kicking, rib-cracking, lip-bloodying “shit stomp.”

In spite of the threat of permanent injury, some coaches and most young players think that locker-boxing is a sound test of manhood. Said one shocked hockey dad to a Globe and Mail reporter: “They close the door, and it’s Lord of the Flies in there.”

Yet sports fans wonder about the origin of hockey goons, the noggin-clobberers who board-slam and highstick opponents instead of outskating and outscoring them.

But parents are not at fault. Oh no! In my local arena here in southern Ontario during a game played by young kids, I watched a mother stands-coaching her son while sucking on a beer hidden in a paper bag. When her eleven-year-old son failed to check an opponent properly, she screamed at her son, “Paste him! Paste that fuck, you little faggot! You afraid of him?” That sodden slut said that to her own son! Dear darling mommy pissed as a newt at nine o’clock in the morning. I don’t think one has to ponder too long the caliber of persons involved in much of minor-league hockey.

Tip # 34 from your loving coach: Remember, guys, you don't need a face to get through life. What are you, a bunch of pussies?

Saturday, Jan. 27, 2007

A site visitor in Quebec’s Eastern Townships who wishes to be anonymous says my piece on locker-boxing is “one-sided” and is “anti-sport hysteria.” Why, thank you. The lady claims plenty of intelligent parents fear constantly for their children’s well-being; plenty of hockey moms and dads are not trying to fill up their own failed, vacuous lives by living vicariously through their children’s amateur sports victories.

Oh really?

For proof of that Candide-like utterance, I'd have to see a terabyte of psychiatric evidence.

If parents fear constantly for their children's physical health, why— inbetween polishing their trophies for being Mother-of-the-Year and counting their sons’ facial stitches — why then do they send their children into known danger, to play one of the most violent games, to put their children's safety in the hands of hockey coaches some of whom are clearly psychotic and others of whom are pedophilic drug-dealers offering ten-year-olds anabolic steroids? Come on, is it impossible in this country to be honest about hockey for even a nano-second? Let's be frank. Some of these psycho thugs of machismo should be behind bars, not behind nets.

Victim impact stories constitute some of the proof and here is one story. The lady reader of my site who emailed me her disapproval of my column also bolstered it by blowing the offside whistle quoting an article on locker-boxing from “Canadian Parents” website:

“For Scott Randles, a 14-year-old from Lower Sackville, N.S. who suffered a concussion from locker boxing two years ago, it’s had a life-altering effect.

Following Randles’ locker boxing concussion, he had three other hockey-related concussions, one coming just three games after the initial incident.

Now, two years later, his memory is weak and he has trouble concentrating.

‘Sometimes I blank out and I’ll look at the clock and it will be two minutes later,’ Randles said. ‘It’s a lot harder to learn stuff, and it’s a lot harder to remember things.’

Contact sports are no longer an option, but he’s taken up playing guitar and bass to fill the void.

His mother, Sharon Randles, told CTV.ca she was horrified by her son’s injury.

‘You hope not, but you’re expecting that, if your child is going to get hurt playing hockey, it’s going to be on the ice,’ she said.”

The full article is available here:

http://forum.canadianparents.ca/ubbthreads/

showflat.php?Cat=&Number=362981&Main=362981

The same Canadian Parents article quotes an editorial in the May/June 2007 number of The Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine which describes locker boxing as “adolescent risk-taking behaviour with significant potential for concussion.”

Reviews of my Book

Click bookcover for preview

A Great New Review of My Latest Book!

October 26, 2011

Welcome to the Enchanted Forest

By WB Johnston

This review is about Bill Casselman’s latest e-book about words: Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik: A Word Lover’s Guide to the Weirdest, Wackiest, and Wonkiest Lexical Gems (Kindle Edition)

“Wade Davis, lately of National Geographic, once described each living language as “an old-growth forest of the human spirit.” Once you decide to enter the kleptomaniacal woods of our mother tongue, what you need is more than a tour guide. This is no Disney-fied ‘keep-your-hands-inside-the-car-at all-times’, point A to point B, clear-cutting mining of language. You, here, are in the hands of Sir William of Cassel, a genuine shaman modestly posing as a simple lover of words.

In the best of the spiritual tradition, Bill is the shape-shifter who constantly leads you to all the places you need to find in your soul. Every page is a new country, an invitation to an excursion into the wonderland of rich connections with the myriad of sources of what so often we unthinkingly wield as a prosaic tool.

Pay absolutely no attention to anyone who tells you that this book is anything but pure gold. It’s simply not true, sadly, that all the world loves a lover. Particularly someone whose love is so boundless.

But Sir William is fearless. You don’t earn your keep as a medicine man if you have a thin skin. While I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could walk away from this book unmoved by its wit, its wisdom and the beautiful transparency by which the author celebrates the glorious romp of our almost unlimited linguistic exuberance, I have to sadly conclude that once in a while, you do meet someone who can’t see the forest for the trees, eh?

Read this book. Leave it on the sofa instead of the $%#!*$% TV remote. Maybe someone you care about will pick it up, even just for a moment, and fall in love with their heritage?

Leave it on your desk at work and trust that someone will riffle through it when you are out at lunch. Shamans are magicians of the highest order. The work of their hands and hearts is game-changing. Or, hey, put it on your Kindle and just feel comforted that you can wander back out into the forest with Bill even in the middle of a boring lecture.

Enjoy.”

(Casselman replies: Thank you so much, Dr. J., for the kudos.)

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Jenni French of San Francisco, California writes on her blog “My Corner of the Universe” for March 19, 2011:

Casselman, Bill. Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik: A World Lover’s Guide to the Weirdest, Wackiest, and Wonkiest Lexical Gems. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2010.

“I admit it: I’m a word nerd. I love words: weird words, long words, obscure words, funny words. This book is right up my alley. With chapters like “Nautical Words,” “Creepy Words,” and “Edible Words,” I have enjoyed every page of this book.

And the author has quite a way with words, so I have found myself rereading many sentences in this book and slowing my progress through it.

My current favorite sentence is found in a discussion of dog hybrid breed names: “What a revolting concatenation of cutesiness and smarmy nomenclatorial treacle parading under the name of canine hybrid breed names” (19).

I’m sure I’ll have another favorite sentence in a day or two.

This book is just that good and just that entertaining.”

(Author Bill Casselman replies: “Thanks, Jenni!” )

Just a reminder that this book contains my ALL-NEW word essays, none of which are available anywhere else in print or online.

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Cindy Lapeña on her blog “Creativity Unlimited” of July 19 ,2011, writes:

Posted by mimrlith in 365 Things to Look Forward to.
Tags: 365 things to look forward to, books, reading

19. Starting a book

To a certified bibliophile like me, a.k.a. bookworm, one of the most exciting things to look forward to is to start reading a new book. In fact, sometimes the prospect of starting to read a new book is so exciting that I have to hurry to finish the book I am currently reading, just so I can start a new one.

If there’s one thing I can’t resist, it’s a book, especially if it promises to be a good one. Of course there are certain books I just won’t touch or be seen with, but at the risk of being hung by my thumbs by fans of such literature, I will not mention any genres in particular. . .

Seeing a book with a title that totally captivates me, like Where a Dobdob meets a Dikdik (yes, that is a book title!) has me so worked up, I just can’t wait to dive in. I imagine all sorts of deliciously fancifully outrageous words with a title like that. Is it obvious? I just love books on words. You won’t believe how many dictionaries I own. Or books on lexical oddities and other lexical explorations. Yes, I am a logophile of sorts. I love the new words I pick up from new books. I relish finding out the meanings of all manner of words and phrases and expressions. What could be more fun?”

(Replies author Bill Casselman: Please scroll to bottom of page or click here to link to a free seven-page preview of my book, Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik.

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Testimonial Email

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Dear Mr. Casselman,
A search for the origins of an improbable-looking word, paraprosdokian, led me to the first piece of your prose I have had the pleasure of reading, “The Bogus Word Paraprosdokian & Lazy Con Artists of Academe.” I have just placed an order for Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik, Canadian Words & Sayings, and As The Canoe Tips, and will add more of your titles as I finish these.

I have just retired from a 40-plus year career in book publishing, the last thirty years spent as director/editor of a number of university presses, attempting to sort the genuine writers from the “Lazy Con Artists of Academe.” Sad to say, the latter have so over-bred the former that I could no longer see the rare gem in the avalanches of offal that daily swamped my office and desk. I visited your website and spent far too long there; it was a pleasure to meet a real writer through his work.

. . . I revisited the paraprosdokian page, and have finally quit laughing again at “Casselman’s Conclusion.” You were not unkind to the “profligate prof-lets.” During my years as an acquisitions editor, in rejection letters I often quoted Prof. Moses Hadas, classicist at Columbia University, who wrote a young scholar in response to having been sent the prof-let’s first book, “Thank you for sending me your book. I will waste no time reading it.”

I know I will enjoy your books. Keep up the good work.

Thank you,
Luther Wilson
Director (Retired)
University of New Mexico Press, among others

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