I went over to Wikipedia earlier this evening, hoping to find out what major University of Florida football quarterback Tim Tebow was graduating in. I didn’t find that out, but I did run across this sentence there:<\/p>\n
\nOne of the reasons he chose Florida was because of Meyer’s spread option offense, an offense for which Tebow was deemed a prototypical quarterback.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Given that the spread option offense has existed since the 1920s, it seems unlikely that Tebow was around then to serve as the prototype of a quarterback to run it. So I changed that to read:<\/p>\n
\nOne of the reasons he chose Florida was because of Meyer’s spread option offense, an offense for which Tebow was deemed an archetypal quarterback.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
and left this explanation for others editing the page:<\/p>\n
\n prototype=first of kind or preliminary; archetype=instance most indicative of the type\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Before committing that change, I did look to see if I could get the Gainesville Sun article that was referenced for that sentence. I had no joy on that, but Google indicates that sports writers seem to have this as a common confusion over the difference in the terms.<\/p>\n
\n Results 1 – 10 of about 156,000 for tebow prototypical\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
and<\/p>\n
\nResults 1 – 10 of about 746,000 for football prototypical\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m sure some of those are legitimate uses of “prototypical”, but my sense from looking over a small sample is that most are not.<\/p>\n
Update: I found Tebow’s major; it is “Family, Youth and Community Sciences” in the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The web page says that the program is an applied social science.<\/p>\n
Further update: I’ve found at least one source that defines “prototype” as “a standard or typical example”. That would make sense of a lot more of the usage I see in sports writing, but would still leave out those that are trying to communicate a sense of someone being exceptional in performance. It is certainly out of place in trying to use it in description of Tebow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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