As a life-long American, and with all due respect to fellow American (I think) Eonwe, I can’t imagine anyone saying “I’ve got tickets to see Green Bay.”
“I’ve got tickets to see the Muppets movie,” OK.
“I’ve got tickets to see Wicked,” sure.
“I’ve got tickets to see Springsteen,” yes, even though you’re going mainly in order to hear him.
But “I’ve got tickets to the Green Bay game,” is the only construction I’ve ever heard. Well, also, “I’ve got Packers tickets,” but that doesn’t apply to this discussion.
(Not that logic always applies to language, but the reason you’re going is to see the game, not to see the team.)
I don’t think Cleese was particularly concerned about whether Americans would be able to follow the joke when he wrote it. In the context of the show’s intended audience, the phrasing is not unfamiliar to a lot of people.
I watched FT on PBS when I was a teen almost 30 years ago. I remember laughing myself sick. I haven’t seen it since then but just checked and it’s on Netflix streaming. I can’t wait to see how it’s held up for me.
It was a slur on his intelligence because it was an “understand this for me” question: if he were genuinely interested in finding out something he didn’t know, googling “The Oval” turns up this as the first result, and the first sentence of the fourth paragraph yields “…the first ever Test Match in England… was played at the Oval in 1880 between England and Australia”. It really isn’t a strain on the intellect to make sense of the line.
The first time I saw that episode, I couldn’t clearly make out what the Major said. “At the O----” what? I guessed it might have been a theatre name like “Orpheum” or “Odeon.” So for a time I assumed, like the OP, that he was talking about something like a Gilbert and Sullivan production. It was when I asked someone else – someone familiar with test cricket – that I learned that it was actually “Oval” and it was a test match.
Of course, we didn’t have Wikipedia then, but even if we had, I would not have found that correct entry.
And the “Wir wollen ein auto meiten” question from the Germans, which Basil interprets as “we want to volunteer to go out and get the meat.” “We have meat here! In ze building! Mooooooooo!”
Enough already. There is to be no more discussion of whether the OP’s question is lazy or stupid or different from any other question asked on millions of message boards. Either discuss Fawlty Towers or something related to the phrasing, or don’t participate in the thread.
What I think you forget is that although America *is *obsessed with sports teams just as much (if not more) as Europe is, we are not at all a uni-sport country. We have *three *major league sports: baseball, football and basketball, and all three are equally popular in pretty much every part of the country. And, again, except for I think two Canadian MLB teams all our teams are domestic. The **ONLY **time you’d hear something like ‘India beat Australia’ would be during the Olympics and they’re only every four years and only occasionally hosted on US soil.
So identifying a soccer team by simply referring to them by their country of origin, yeah, sounds really really odd and unspecific and illogical to us!
Not sure what you mean. We always say the Yankees or the Giants. In fact all the teams end with ‘s’ except for the Sox teams and they end with an ‘s’ sound! We also say ‘they beat so and so’ and ‘they’re playing tonight’. When do we refer to them in the singular?
BTW, this is all a little ironic because I am not even remotely a sports fan!
P.S. Oops! Posted before reading Marley23’s post. So forget everything I said!
