War on Chinglish (16)

sports and games


Sports and games are not the same. A sport is an activity that exercises physical skill and/or strength. A game, however, is a form of competition defined by a complex set of rules, in which two sides contend simultaneously for victory against each other.

Running, swimming, skating, and pole-vaulting, for example, are sports but not games

(they have no aim other than to be the fastest, highest, furthest, etc.; and although several sportsmen may take part at the same time [e.g., in a sprint race] they are essentially competing individually, to try to give the best performance that they can; they are not confronting another competitor, to physically prevent him from attaining victory).

Chess, draughts, poker, backgammon, and go (weiqi) are games but not sports

(because they test purely mental, not physical ability).

Some competitive activities are both games (head-to-head competition within a defined set of rules) and sports (dependent on physical prowess): football, hockey, volleyball, basketball, etc.

A few activities may sometimes be seen as definitional grey areas. Some people object that table tennis is scarcely a sport, since it depends mostly on mental toughness and speed of reaction rather than strength or stamina. Others call darts a sport because it involves throwing something, even though the amount of physical effort involved is minimal.

Martial arts - such as boxing, wrestling, judo and taekwondo - are perhaps something of a special case: even though they are closely defined by rules and involve head-to-head competition, they are traditionally treated as sports not games. This is perhaps because a further element in the concept of a 'game' is that the victory conditions involve the achievement of some artificial object such as scoring a goal or making a basket. In martial arts, though the scoring systems may be quite elaborate, the fundamental aim is far simpler and more direct, less abstract: it is the physical domination of one's opponent - a fairly straightforward objective, more akin to running fastest in a race, or throwing furthest in the discus event.

The combined term sports games exists only in the Universe of Chinglish.


This is another of those occasions where Chinese only seems to have one common verb for use with all forms of physical exertion - and it always gets 'translated' into English as play.

Sorry, folks, that doesn't work. You have to be aware of the distinction between sports and games -

you play games but you do sports.

(Occasionally, we also use go with a few sports - I go swimming, I go running - to indicate that we are leaving the house to take part in them, just as we do with activities like shopping or hiking.)

Similarly, players play games; sportsmen do sports. Usain Bolt is not a player, because his event - sprint racing - is only a sport, not a game; he is a sportsman. David Beckham can be described as either a player or a sportsman, because football is both a game and a sport.

I had hoped that with the splurge of 'sports English' language training initiatives that popped up in the run-up to the Olympics, these stubborn Chinglishisms might at last be displaced - but, if anything, they seem to have been becoming even more entrenched.

It even bleeds through into the way some expats speak English: I've heard friends saying things like, "I'm going to play tai chi on Sunday." No, you're not; you're going to do tai chi. Please, remember the beauty of your mother tongue! Don't let it get tainted by this morass of Chinglish we find ourselves surrounded by.