EDITOR'S NOTE: Monday, Dec. 13, is Cliché Day, celebrated from coast to coast in sports sections across this great land of ours. Page 2 honors this most cherished of American holidays by going straight to the source with a special offering from Page 2 Columnist Emeritus Jim Caple the First, who spent nearly 35 years covering sports on the Internet for ESPN.com during the early part of the 20th century.

Go ahead, you @#$% geniuses. Insult me all you want by calling them "clichés." I call them the finest words I ever wrote.

Yeah, that's right. I'm the guy who came up with the biggest and best clichés in the business.

"You can throw the records out."

"You have to play them one at a time."

"There's no tomorrow."

Those are all mine, plus plenty more. And there's a reason you @#$% modern geniuses consider these gems "cliches." I wrote them to last. And by golly, they have. They're so damn good that people are still repeating them seven decades after they became fish wrap.

I'd like to see today's little @$&% come up with a single phrase worth repeating 70 years from now. With little actual knowledge of the sports they cover, today's sportswriters try to spice up their copy with allusions to the latest pop cultural icons. Not only will these "clever" references be woefully outdated within a year or two, most are so strained that they already fly over the heads of most Western Union operators. (Who the hell is this Madonna, anyway?)

We didn't do that in the old days. Back when Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun, Granny Rice and I were on the beat, we wrote so the readers understood what we meant. We didn't expect readers to know the names of the latest stars of the talkies or the latest crooners on your Hit Parade -- you just had to know the game. If Babe Ruth hit a home run, we didn't write some hysterical nonsense like, "Ruth hit a towering home run that would have cleared Fatty Arbuckle on a pitch that had better curves than Clara Bow." No, we spelled it out clear as day: "The Sultan of Swat touched them all by walloping a circuit clout off the port-sided slabsman's Uncle Charlie for his 46th four-bagger on the season."

But do we get any credit for our contributions? Hell, no. All we get is the scorn of you @#%& uneducated geniuses. And I'm tired of it. From now on, I want royalties whenever you use any of my "clichés" listed below.

1. "He gave 110 percent."

Lance might be the only guy who can break the 110-percent barrier.

Back when teams traveled by train all the way from New York to St. Louis and the players had to wear flannel uniforms and play doubleheaders in 120-degree heat without air conditioning in the hotels, we understood that they couldn't be expected to give it their all every day. A typical effort was maybe 78 percent or 82 percent. Anything above that was considered really incredible. So when Lou Gehrig became the first player to clout four round-trippers in one contest, I did some quick measurements and calculated exactly how much effort was required to do it. So my lead was: "Outlined against a blue-teal summer sky, the Iron Horse of the Bronx Bombers gave an unprecedented 109.6 percent in clubbing a quartet of big potatoes this afternoon at the House That Ruth Built."

Some wise guy on the desk rounded the figure up to 110 percent and that's how it read in the final edition, which made it sound like I just made the figure up. I'm still pretty steamed about that, but I got to admit it does have a certain ring to it.

Anyway, that was 72 years ago and guys are still using "He gave 110 percent" as the standard for maximum effort. Heck, some people are even inflating the figure to 120 or 130 percent, which is utter nonsense. How can anyone give more than 110 percent? OK, maybe Lance Armstrong gives 115 percent, but that's only once a year. And no way can anyone give 120 percent. But what do you expect from the @#&% morons covering sports today?

2. "By the nose of the football."

Today's @#&% ignorant writers wouldn't know it, but the reason a football is known as a pigskin is that it was made from pigskin in the old days. And I don't mean it was made of leather; I mean actual pigskin. They would slaughter a hog before a game, stuff him tight with cotton and three-penny nails, sew him back up and play the entire afternoon with him. A lot of places, they wouldn't even bother cutting off the tail, the ears or the snout -- they'd leave them right on. So when I wrote, "The Galloping Ghost took the field general's handoff and plunged across No Man's Land for eight violent yards of enemy territory, propelling the chains by the nose of the football," I wasn't relying on some cheap "cliché," I was referring to the actual nose on the ball.

(And you don't even want to know how Spalding stitched its logo onto the pigskin.)

3. "You can feel the electricity."

I introduced this phrase after Johnny Vander Meer's second consecutive no-hitter, which as all sportswriters should know -- but I doubt today's stupid @#&% do -- was also the first night game ever played at Ebbets Field. When I wrote, "As the Dutch Master gripped the pill and toed the alien humpback to face the final enemy batsman of his second consecutive cipher job, the hoarse-throated assemblage could feel the electricity in the cozy bandbox," I meant they literally "felt the electricity." That's because the stadium engineers had to run the power lines under the seats, and the insulation on the wiring in those days wasn't always up to code. Heck, when they turned the lights on, half the crowd looked like Larry Fine.

Don't you want to make T.O. write "There's no 'I' in "team" 500 times on the blackboard?

4. "There's no 'I' in team."

Today's @#%& pampered writers are pretty proud of their little laptop "computers" that allow them to connect to the "World Wide Web." But in the old days, we had to lug around 40-pound manual typewriters and write on carbon paper. Anyway, we had one guy at our paper who insisted on using his "lucky" Underwood that was at least 10 years old when he bought it used in 1916. He drank so much that the keys were always sticking from the Scotch he spilled over them. One day I was working the desk and his copy was just filled with typos because his keys kept sticking. After about three pages of that mess, I finally couldn't take it anymore and yelled at him: "Dammit, it's T-E-A-M, not T-E-I-A-M. There's no 'I' in team!" And like so many phrases I coined, it just caught on from there.

5. "He carried the football like it was a loaf of bread."

This one came to me one afternoon during the depths of the Depression, when everyone was out of work and selling apples on the street and guys would stick a shiv in your gut for a box of Wheaties. You had to be pretty careful walking home from the store back then, let me tell you; and whenever I crossed through this one neighborhood, I had to wrap my arms around all the groceries to protect them. When I got home this one day, my wife said, "You must have had to avoid a lot of hungry thieves -- you're carrying the loaf of bread like it was a football." Now, I had been toying with some phrases -- "He carried the football like it was a wheelbarrel of turnips," and "He carried the football like it was a briefcase of walnuts" -- but as soon as my wife said that, I knew exactly what to do. I twisted the phrase around the next weekend at the Army-Notre Dame game, and I had an instant classic.

The funny thing is, I also wrote "He dribbled the basketball like it was a carved pumpkin," and "He swung the bat like it was an umbrella, only heavier, made of wood and tapered" but they never caught on. I dunno. Maybe I tried too hard with those two phrases to follow up my success with the "loaf of bread" line. That's the thing about writing a good cliché -- you have to stay within yourself and write them one at a time.

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com