Penalties for Homophobia

Before I begin - and boy, have we got a column for you this week (not yet you haven’t, warns an inner voice, but something may occur) - yes, before I begin, something that has been troubling me for some time: what exactly is a stonewall penalty? I am sure I am not alone in noting this usage from outraged football managers and pundits when serious incidents in the penalty box are deemed to have gone unpunished.

Actually, I know I am not alone, because after hearing it three times in the past week I got Messrs Google on to the job, and not only found several managers "slamming" refs who had denied their sides the aforementioned SP but also a small debate on the topic on Guardian Unlimited’s football site. I have to agree with my cyber colleagues, it is meaningless. To stonewall is a verb, meaning, in a political context, to use delaying tactics and, in a cricket context, to play defensive strokes. It cannot be used as an adjective.

A Stonewall penalty, I could understand. That would be some sort of sanction imposed by the campaign group for gay and lesbian equality; perhaps being branded homophobic on the section of the Stonewall website that lists gay-friendly employers. (In case you are interested, Britain’s most gay-friendly employer is Staffordshire Police, who I like to think might consider renaming their organization Bona Constables, as a tribute to the late, great Kenneth Williams, and have more coppers trolling the beat.)

Interestingly, a variation on the SP surfaced in the Wigan chairman Dave Whelan’s interview on Sky after his side’s Carling Cup victory over Arsenal, when he accused the ref of denying Wigan at least two "stone-cold" penalties. This seems to make a little more sense, but not much.

You could argue, I suppose, that a stone-cold dish of baked beans on toast or filets de rouget à la Provençale has a certain obviousness, by dint of standing there for some time on its plate, or in a tin-foil container, but I am afraid I still do not see the expression troubling the "Towards More Colorful Speech" feature in the Reader’s Digest for the time being.

I took this problem to the Football Association’s linguistics compliance officer to see if anything could be done, but he was too busy at the time, trying to teach the past conditional tense to Chris Kamara: "Look, Chris. It’s a replay of something that has already happened, so you don’t say ‘If he gets anything on that, he scores’. It’s ‘If he had got anything on that, he would have scored’. All right?"

Language problems also dog the Potters Holidays World Indoor Bowls Championships - the Potters, as we veterans know it - televised extensively on the BBC over the past week.

Indoor bowls has the image, perpetuated by smart-arse columns such as this, of an irredeemably suburban pastime, enjoyed mostly by people whose idea of fun is a night in with the Telegraph crossword and a plate of Viennese whirls, the sort of folk who, in a particularly rebellious mood, will deliberately neglect to put a coaster under their cup of coffee. I cannot help feeling that one of the main reasons for this stereotype is the fact that the game is played on a carpet.

If they called the playing area a pitch or a square, the sport might have more chance of reaching the younger, sexier demographic to which every product and activity in the world for some reason aspires (I am sure in some ad agency somewhere a discussion is going on about how Preparation H can be more "down with the kids"). Games played on a carpet - not on that groovy wood flooring you find in trendy warehouse conversions, but on a carpet - can never be sexy, conjuring up visions of the family all back for Christmas gathered on the floor around the Monopoly board, Only Fools and Horses flickering on the TV set in the corner, and Auntie Eileen in the kitchen helping load the dishwasher.

The bowls people try, bless them, employing an MC - who sounds like the darts guy might if a court injunction had been taken out to make him keep the noise down - and making a half-hearted attempt to give one or two of the players nicknames. The top seed Paul Foster, for instance, was introduced as Paul "Fozzy" Foster, but you never heard anyone refer to him as Fozzy in any other context.

Fozzy - see, I am doing my best for you - was knocked out by Robert Paxton, a 27-year-old postman from Devon, whose theoretical nickname is - obviously - Postman Pax, in a tense and compelling game of bowls. In the post-match interview, both the combatants were unfailingly polite, as is customary at the Potters, and noticeably reluctant to call each other Fozzy or Paxo, or anything more colorful than Paul and Robert. Others throughout the week followed their lead.

Though I hesitate to accuse any sport of being too nice for its own good, I am compelled to wonder whether bowls, which seems to call for at least as much skill as darts and definitely a higher level of tactical nous, would give the arrows more of a run for their money if the gas were turned up a little. From lukewarm to just short of piping, maybe, which I feel would make a bigger buzz for the viewers a stone-cold certainty.