munson-nixon line
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.69 in modern English
24
Scrabble Score
15
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
A hypothetical boundary line between sports fandoms in Connecticut, supporting Boston-based teams to the east and New York City-based teams to the west; the exact boundaries are undefined.
Informal
Example Sentences
- "Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated has called the line running through Connecticut that separates Yankee fans and Red Sox fans the Munson-Nixon line. Mr. Rushin came up with the name — in honor of the late Yankee catcher Thurman Munson and the retired Red Sox right fielder Trot Nixon — in 2003, and he had to guess where the line ran: “north of New Haven but south of Hartford, running the breadth of central Connecticut.”"
- "While there are certainly Yankee fans (and assorted “Uncle Phils”) scattered throughout New England, with sizeable pockets of them in both Vermont and the Berkshires of western Massachusetts (Jim Bouton’s backyard), the border of Red Sox nation becomes most porous in southern Connecticut. While unmarked and unpatrolled (not to mention unsecured), the border does have an official name: the Munson-Nixon Line."
- "Numerous would-be cartographers over the years have tried to identify the exact location of what my colleague Steve Rushin in 2003 termed the Munson-Nixon line, named for former Yankees catcher Thurman Munson and Red Sox outfielder Trot Nixon."
- "You may have heard of the Mason-Dixon line separating the North from the South. In Connecticut, they have what some call the "Munson-Nixon" line - as in Thurman of the Yankees and Trot of the Red Sox."
Etymology
Named after baseball players Thurman Munson (of the New York Yankees) and Trot Nixon (of the Boston Red Sox), by analogy with Mason-Dixon Line, coined in 2003 by Steve Rushin in Sports Illustrated.
Usage
Inflected Forms
the Munson–Nixon Line (canonical)