Wisconsin's Nigel Hayes Ramps Up Stenographer Battle Before Final Four

Nigel Hayes has been pinging five-dollar words off the stenographer's table for a while now.

Since entering NCAA tournament play, the Wisconsin Badgers forward has thrown all sorts of syllabic curveballs at the typists recording every spoken word at his team's press conferences.

So far, he's rattled off "cattywampus," "onomatopoeia," "soliloquy," "antidisestablishmentarianism," "zephyr," "xylophone" and a host of other finger-mangling words. It's become a tradition, and he's not backing down from any stenographer—"beautiful" or otherwise.

Thus we have Hayes' latest dime, which he dropped Friday afternoon during Wisconsin's last pre-Final Four press conference. 

He opened things up with another doozy: "prestidigitation."

For those who don't know (meaning me), the term apparently means sleight of hand or "magic tricks performed as entertainment."

The more you know, right?

Dan is on Twitter. He's waiting for Hayes to make some poor typist weep with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.