Wrestling: language falling short
Sometimes your words just don’t work. The second tier wrestler Raven, no longer in the WWE, is now one of the stars of a smaller federation. He has taken to saying “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore'” at the end of almost every speech he gives, which is a fair enough way of saying “You’re finished!” However, when what he has just said, as in the show I just watched, is “I’m coming for your title belt,” it does rather suggest that he thinks he has no chance of ever winning it.
The Raven match I was just watching is a six-man tag match, and there was this sense of hilarious anti-climax in the introduction of the other team: “The man-monster ABYSS! LEGEND! AND Kevin Northcutt…”
And this gives me an irresistible chance to quote again my favourite example of disconnect between what you see and what you hear in the history of sports commentary: commentator “Raven is the master of psychological warfare.” Action while he says this: Raven hits someone over the head with a steel chair. I don’t think taking the head as your target makes that psychological, really.