You may not like boxing, but our language does!

Have you ever been "on the ropes"? Probably. (In trouble, on the defensive.)

Did you have someone "in your corner"? I hope so. (Friends, family, whoever.)

Were you ever "down for the count" or "counted out"? I hope not. (But you can rise again!)

Boxing is a primal sport. We humans don't have many weapons at our disposal. The basic one is our balled fist. (We can kick, but that requires training and dexterity.) When someone pisses us off, we ball up a fist and hit, right? From elementary school on, boys hit each other that way. Not with much skill, but they do it. Always have, always will.

Boxing takes that elementary skill/impulse and refines it into a sport. We have padded gloves so that no one gets hurt too much. We have referees to stop any fight that is a mis-match. And each bout is only three minutes per round, so that the participants get to rest a full minute between rounds. And they have every right not to come out for the next round. It happens.

Boxing hasn't always been, probably isn't now, a favorite sport for those who love tossing and kicking and throwing balls around a field. But it has always appealed to some of us who like to see two guys (or girls now), on their own, with no teams supporting them, facing each other in the most basic form of self-defense available to them, and to us. It's brutal, and boxers do get hurt, but they sustain far fewer career-ending injuries than do, say, professional football players. If in doubt, check your figures and get back to me.

Some opponents of boxing like to point to Muhammed Ali, who has been reduced, by too many blows to the head, to a Parkinson's disease state. But he kept at it well past when he should have quit, because he had a big entourage to support.

Did you ever see him in his prime? He's the reason lots of us who aren't uber-athletic were drawn to boxing in the first place. He was so handsome and so fast and so full of himself, in a totally self-deprecating, and even funny, way, that we couldn't help but fall in love with his sport of choice. He used to say, "I'm too pretty to get beaten." And we believed it. He was! Once he said that his strategy to whip his next opponent was to "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Here was a beautiful, brutal man with a gift for poetry. What wasn't to like?

But back to the point: our language has been enriched more by boxing than by any other sport.

"In the ring." Don't potential political aspirants throw their hats there?

"Below the belt." Ever been hit there? Doesn't feel good, does it? (See also: "low blow".)

Have you ever had to "back-pedal"? That refers to a boxer who has to start stepping backwards, trying to get away from his opponent. It looks like what you would do if you could pedal a bicycle backwards, which you can't. You're in retreat.

What is your "fighting weight"? It's where you feel your best, your strongest.

Ever heard of "the old one-two"? It's a jab followed by a power punch. Ouch!

"Fancy footwork"? Politicians do this all the time, dancing around an issue they don't want to discuss.

"The Main Event"? The biggest show in town, The Heavyweight Championship of the World.

Okay, you get the point. Boxing may not be your thing, but it has had an impact on our shared language, and you may well use some of its sayings yourself without thinking. Anything as basic to the human experience as boxing -- hitting each other with fists -- is bound to continue, like it or not, and to continue adding to our language.

Have you ever been anyone's "punching bag"? I sincerely hope not.

Have you ever "taken off the gloves"? That means, to most of us, getting down to the real business at hand. But, in boxing, it means going back to the bad old days when boxers didn't wear gloves, when "bare-knuckled" fights were the draw. In our own lives, it means getting down to what really matters. No pretense: just lay it on the line.