There are very few positives amid the feverish fallout of Sidney Crosby's high ankle sprain, and one of the least appreciated dangers is the always volatile collision of the sports media and medical terminology.

The first time I'd ever heard of the high ankle sprain, for example, was in college, where this one time, my roommate got high, and sprained his ankle. Hence the term. This pretty much captures the depth of our understanding of such things, so be careful when we try to explain what they actually mean medically.

That said, let us proceed.

There are three types of ankle sprains, basically. Your regular old generic ankle sprain, the high ankle sprain prominent athletes seem to get so much publicity for, and the exceedingly high ankle sprain, sometimes called a concussion.

Tom Brady, a week before the Super Bowl, is alleged to be nursing a mild high ankle sprain, which would lead me to believe high ankle sprains are grouped pretty much like buffalo wings. There's your mild, your regular, your hot, and your atomic. Crosby's falls between regular and hot, which is why the medical people are saying six-to-eight weeks.

You think I'm kidding?

This is the way we process things.

We're in sports media for a reason, the big one being the med schools had this ridiculous biology requirement.

It was a sports writer, after all, who, at a press conference with surgeons in 1995, asked if Mickey Mantle could live without his liver.

The doc said the only thing he could say.

"Sports writer, right?"

Yeah.

I'm sure you read this week that the high ankle sprain is nettlesome because it involves the ligaments joining the two bones in the lower leg to the ankle. The two bones in the lower leg are, and you could look this up, the tibia and the fibula. Still, when Willie Parker left the field for good Dec. 20 in St. Louis, USA Today reported exclusively the next day that the great Steelers running back had, on his first carry that night, broken his fibia.

This loose approximation on medical news has a long and storied history in sports journalism, which has never been above simply inventing terminology that may or may not exist in nature, let alone medicine.

Occasionally, we'll see a player leave the field because "he got dinged."

Don't look that up, because it'll say, "to cause to clang, as by striking."

Some guys get dinged because, apparently, it's a synonym for "he got his bell rung."

On a Steelers radiocast a few years back, Tunch Ilkin said, "he got his bell cleaned" when someone got dinged, a mix of "he got his bell rung" and "he got his clock cleaned." I would urge you, however, regarding your handy anatomy text, do not ding yourself trying to find the exact location of the bell. Same for the clock. No one's ever gone on injured reserve with a high clock sprain or an inflamed bell.

Occasionally, although I haven't heard it in some time, a broadcaster describing someone who has had his bell rung or his clock cleaned will say, "he's on Queer Street right now." I'm not even going to speculate on the origin of Queer Street, except to say that I hope it's a lovely place lined with quaint shops were you can buy a clock, or a bell.

Beware as well the term "tweak."

Brady himself, cornered this week by ravenous Manhattan paparazzi, said he'd just "tweaked" his ankle, tweak being a nebulous term defined as "to pinch or pull with a jerk and twist," and alternately as "modifying in some minor way." In the second way, I've had some columns tweaked by editors (others got the snot tweaked out of 'em), but Brady seems to have been a victim of the first definition. I suppose it's possible that you could tweak something on your own, but it's probably preferable to involve a supermodel, not that I'm suggesting anything.

Charley Horse, by contrast, is an official medical designation, being a contusion or bruise resulting in intra-muscular bleeding. Never confuse this with a Barley Horse, which is a hangover.

Often in football and hockey, a player will get into a collision of such ferocity that the announcer will say, "Wow, he'll feel that tomorrow." But as my friend, the comic Buzz Nutley says, "What about today? Nothing today? Is he walking around somewhere tomorrow when all of a sudden he feels it and goes, 'Whoa! I must have done somethin' yesterday'?"

Among the newest additions to the ever-expanding sports injury lexicon is the so-called "sports hernia," which is in fact, a hernia without the hernia part, a weakening of the muscle wall without there being an actual pouch-like protrusion sticking through that wall. Thankfully, there's no such thing as a journalism hernia, but come to think of it, I haven't called off sick in a while.