The Mexican Wave
noun phrase

- the movement made by a group of people especially in a stadium or arena in which people stand up and then sit down again according to where they are sitting in order to create the appearance of an ocean wave

Merriam-Webster

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ORIGIN

The MEXICAN WAVE phenomenon came to a mass audience during the football World Cup held in Mexico in 1986. It had originated somewhat earlier, probably in US colleges.

The action itself, however you name it, certainly pre-dates 1986. In the Fred MacMurray comedy film Son of Flubber, 1963, the crowd at an American football game can clearly be seen to perform what we would now call a MEXICAN WAVE.

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TALKING POINT

In 2002, Tamás Vicsek of the Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary analyzed videos of 14 waves at large Mexican football stadiums, and developed a standard model of wave behaviour (published in Nature). He found that it takes only the actions of a few dozen fans to trigger a wave. Once started, it usually rolls in a clockwise direction at a rate of about 12 m/s (40 ft/s), or about 22 seats per second. At any given time the wave is about 15 seats wide. These observations appear to be applicable across different cultures and sports, though details vary in individual cases.

During the 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, about 210,000 people participated in a wave led by MythBusters hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage.

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SYNONYMS
for wave

beachcombers, billows, bomboras, boomers, breakers, breaking waves, combers, crests, current, drift, foam, froth, ground swells, kahunas, lather, ripples, ripplets, rollers, spindrift, spume, squalls, surf, swell, wave, wavelets, whitecaps, white horses

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“It's believed that the reason MEXICAN WAVES tend to roll clockwise is because of the right-handedness of most spectators.”

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THANKS to Sven for triggering today’s OWAD.

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HERZLICHEN DANK to all readers helping me keep OWAD alive with single or monthly donations at:

https://donorbox.org/please-become-a-friend-of-owad-3

and,

Paul Smith, IBAN: DE75 7316 0000 0002 5477 40