Last night I actu­ally learned a phrase while watch­ing foot­ball. During the New Eng­land vs. San Diego game, one of the announc­ers used the phrase “Pyrrhic Vic­tory” to explain why it was not such a good idea for the San Diego Charg­ers to attempt a field goal on a fourth down, goal line sit­u­a­tion at the begin­ning of the third quar­ter. Why? Well, they were down 24-0. With that score, three points is just a drop in the bucket while seven means you might actu­ally have a chance at get­ting back in the game.

For the record, they went for it, and got the touch­down. Not that it actu­ally mat­tered though.

On a side note, I’d really like to thank Google for inad­ver­tently invent­ing the ‘common sense’ spell checker. How do you look up a word in a dic­tio­nary when you have no idea how to spell it? Google a pho­netic, or some­what pho­netic ver­sion of the word and chances are you’ll find a result. I googled “puric victory” and got this delight­ful little page, which gave me the cor­rect spelling. Inter­est­ingly enough, it describes the phrase as “a staple of every polit­i­cal analyst’s rhetor­i­cal arsenal.” I wonder why I’ve never learned this?