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Sap it up

My interest in the Olympics is largely incidental, fueled by near-constant exposure from the ubiquitous flat-screen televisions of Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The immersion is seamless: ten, twenty minutes might pass before I realize just how riveted I’ve become by, say, fencing techniques.

Then the reporter opens his mouth. And maybe I’m a little misanthropic. But I can’t handle the shameless sentimentality of the Olympics’ television coverage. It makes me cringe. Really, it’s gag-inducing.

So I was amused to find out about Slate’s new Olympics Sap-o-Meter widget, part of their Five Ring Circus 2008 series. The widget, which can be embedded onto your blog, iGoogle or Facebook page, tracks the sappiest words and phrases from each day and assigns Sap Points based off the tool’s scoring system. To wit:

Here’s how it works. After slogging through Olympic broadcasts of yore, we drew up a list of 33 syrupy words that NBC has chronically overused: adversity, battled, cancer, challenges, courage, cry, death, dedication, determination, dream, emotion, glory, golden, hardship, heart, hero, inspiration, inspire, journey, magic, memory, miracle, mom, mother, Olympic-sized, overcome, passion, proud, sacrifice, spirit, tears, tragedy, triumph. While these 33 words are by no means an unabridged collection of schmaltzy nouns, adjectives, and verbs, they’re a good sampling of NBC’s bathos. Think of them as the Dow Jones of sap.

The Sap-o-Meter is accompanied by Slate’s Sap-o-Meter page, updated daily with the day’s most sickly-sweet highlights, a tag cloud of the 33 clichéd words, and a reader-generated “Sappiest Line of the Day.”