Batsmen or batters? Pitches or wickets? Groundsmen or curators? Chinaman bowlers or left-arm wrist spinners? SA or Proteas?
Or all and any of the above? It's time to revisit the way we talk about cricket. Or is it?
Old-fashioned cricket writers change every "batter" players and coaches utter in press conference and interviews to "batsman" in their articles. Why? "Batters play baseball, son, not cricket."
But what if the player holding the bat is a woman? She's clearly playing cricket, not baseball. She's also not a man. Batswoman? Good luck with that.
It doesn't help that women cricketers talk about themselves as batsmen. Do we respect their right to self-identify, or do the logical and call them batters?
In which case the same should apply to men and to hell with what the old farts of the pressbox think: batters all.
Just such an old fart, the late, almost always great, never boring Trevor Chesterfield would screech across the room, in his falsetto voice barbed with a New Zealand accent that never flattened despite the decades he spent in SA: "It's a pitch, ya bloody troglodyte - the wicket is those five bits of wood standing up at either end."
And he was correct. On a bad day he would also call you a "bloody drongo". On a good day he would explain that surface was an acceptable alternative to pitch. But you would hear from him, loudly, if you called it anything else: deck - "Oi! Drongo!" - track - "Shaddup troglodyte!" - strip - "What the hell? Keep your bloody clothes on!".
Chester Trevorfield, as he was called by visiting compatriots, would insist that the last runs to be added to the batting team's total were called sundries. The rest of us called them extras and reminded him he was tallying a scorecard, not a laundry bill. Bloody drongo.
Groundsman is on the same path to extinction as batsman. Except that they're called curators in Australia, which won't sit well with non-Australians - who will argue that if we follow that example we should also say the score the wrong way round. And go nuts as a nation when people are caught ball-tampering.
Besides, proper curators are found in museums - just like your pitch, hey boet? More contemporary specimens of the ilk drape themselves around chronically cool cafés, pouring over leather-bound laptops and "curating" exhibitions of the tattoo scabs of other, slightly less obscure hipsters.
Chinaman is a derogatory term and should you use it without that qualification you are practising racism.
The C-word was racist long before it came to cricket at Old Trafford in 1933, when West Indies left-arm spinner Ellis "Puss" Achong - the first Test player of Chinese heritage - had Walter Robbins stumped.
Most of Achong's deliveries were of the orthodox finger-spin variety. But he slipped in the odd bit of wrist spin, and the ball that dismissed Robbins pitched near the right-hander's off-stump and turned towards middle to sneak between his legs untouched was just that.
"Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman," Robbins is reputed to have muttered to West Indies' captain Learie Constantine as he stalked off.
The pejorative implication of Robbins's alleged statement clangs loud and clear. Good thing someone of Constantine's classiness was on hand to see his prejudice and raise the stakes, again reputedly, with: "Do you mean the bowler or the ball?"
This old fart of a cricket writer balks at using Proteas because it is insipid marketing-speak.
But SA is the geographic and ethnographic name of a country, and sport becomes part of a greater evil when it is hijacked by illusions of patriotism or dangerous nationalism. Just as it does when it is appropriated by people who measure success in the amount of money made from selling replica jerseys.
So, what exactly do we talk about when we talk about cricket?..