• Day three updates with Xander Schauffele in overnight lead
• Scheffler shakes off ‘shock and fear’ of arrest to stay in hunt
• Live scoreboard | And feel free to drop Scott an email

“This could be the lowest scoring day in major-championship history,” opines Sky commentator Paul McGinley. No wind, soft greens, warm sunshine, all that. This being the case, you don’t want to be going backwards too much at any given point. So it’s a big putt for Bob MacIntyre on 3. Having dropped a shot at 2, he’s facing another bogey at 3. Unless he makes a 15-footer, he’ll effectively be making his fourth in his last five holes of play. But in it goes, and Scotland’s only representative here remains at -6.

Shane Lowry is this close to holding out from a greenside bunker at 6. That’s an end to his run of birdies, though. Tom Hoge drains a monster from downtown on 17, his fourth birdie of the day, and he’s -6. And there are opening birdies for Bryson DeChambeau and Austin Eckroat. A lot of players throwing darts, with the course there for the taking.

We’re going backwards: a football player can say hateful things from a university podium while students are being arrested

Imagine for a moment that that you are a young woman who has spent more than $100,000 on your university degree. After four years of hard work it’s your graduation and Harrison Butker, a kicker with the Kansas City Chiefs, is the commencement speaker. During his speech the NFL star, who has made millions by kicking a ball, kindly informs you that your hard-earned degree was a waste of time and that your true role in life is supporting your husband. Imagine what that would be like.

“IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media, all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.” (This doesn’t make any sense, I know, but the entire speech is incoherent.)

Joe Biden has been “vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies”. (Which is certainly true if we’re talking about Gaza – but Butker was talking about abortion rights.)

Pride month is a “deadly sin”.

You can’t spread the antisemitic talking point that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus any more or you’ll end up “in jail”.

Women have been subject to “the most diabolical lies” and, while some women in the audience may go on to have successful careers the majority should be “most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world”.

His wife would be “the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother”. (This sparked long applause from the audience.)

We should fight against “the cultural emasculation of men”.

World No 1’s unlikely brush with the law has raised his profile to a level that his playing abilities alone would never be able to

For 27 years, 10 months, and 26 days the most interesting thing about Scottie Scheffler was his golf. And given that’s what he’s paid for, you might think it ought to be enough. But the truth is that ever since Scheffler rose to the top of the world rankings in March 2022 the game has wanted more from him. Trouble is, besides his faith, his family, and his attachment to a beaten-up old 2012 GMC Yukon, he does not have much else to give. Whisper it, but the truth is that a lot of people in the game worry that Scheffler, who many reckon is the best player of his generation, is just a little bit too boring to carry the sport.

And then he decided to take a detour into the westbound lane on his way through the gates to Valhalla on Friday morning. Last month Scheffler explained that he believed his victory at the Masters was meant to be because God had laid out “today’s plans many years ago, and I could do nothing to mess them up”. Well, either the Lord also takes his marching orders from Kentucky traffic cops, or this is more proof, if we needed it, that he moves in mysterious ways.

Enlarge (credit: Tommy Gilligan/USMA PAO/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

University of Rochester linguist Andrew Bray started out studying the evolution of the trademark sports jargon used in hockey for his master's thesis. For instance, a hockey arena is a "barn," while the puck is a "biscuit." When he would tell people about the project, however, they kept asking if he was trying to determine why American hockey players sound like "fake Canadians." Intrigued, Bray decided to shift his research focus to find out if hockey players did indeed have distinctively Canadian speech patterns and, if so, why this might be the case.

He discovered that US hockey players borrow certain aspects of the Canadian English accent, particularly when it comes to hockey jargon. But they don't follow the typical rules of pronunciation. In short, "American hockey players are not trying to shift their speech to sound more Canadian," Bray said during a press briefing. "They're trying to sound more like a hockey player. That's why it's most evident in hockey-specific terms."

It's a concept known as a "linguistic persona," a means of communicating how one identifies—in this case, as a hockey player— through speech. Bray gave a talk about his research today at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Ottawa, Canada, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association.

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