| 词汇 | screwball |
| 词源 | screwball; screw loose. “King Carl!” Hubbell’s famous screw- ball, which he introduced in the early 1930s, is probably re- sponsible for this expression meaning an eccentric person. The New York Giant pitcher used his screwball in winning 24 games in a row, pitching 46 consecutive scoreless innings, and, most amazing of all, striking out in order the greatest concentration of slugging power ever assembled—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmy Foxx—in the 1934 All-Star game. Hubbell’s erratic pitch obviously got a lot of publicity in the sports pages. Since it corkscrewed crazily as it approached the batter and you never knew how it was going to break, it was inevitably compared with an unpredictable, erratic, eccentric person, helped by the expression he has a screw loose (“is a little unhinged”), com- mon since the 1860s. |
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