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From the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang:

phenom

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noun, US

Something remarkable or 'phenomenal', esp. an unusually gifted person, prodigy. (1881 —) .

New Yorker : He has a series of run-ins with a militant black rookie phenom (1986).

[Shortened from phenomenon.]

Please note that last sentence. There was already a perfectly good word to describe this sportsman, but Americans have chosen to shorten it and as always, the rest of the English-speaking world is following like wiggly puppies.

Dansk (Danish) n. - fænomen

Nederlands (Dutch) zeer begaafd en veelbelovend iemand, fenomeen

Français (French) n. - phénomène

Deutsch (German) n. - (ugs.) sehr begabte Person

Italiano (Italian) fenomeno

Português (Portuguese) n. - fenômeno (m)

Nobody else feels the need to shorten the word. What, does it concentrate the meaning? Are celebrities more famous because they’re celebs, and can you fit more into 24/7 than you can into all the time?

And this brings me to the shoe-in.

It’s a SHOO-IN, dammit!

Michael Quinione puts this much better and more politely than I can.

“SHOO-IN

This one is spelled wrongly so often that it’s likely it will eventually end up that way. The correct form is shoo-in, usually with a hyphen. It has been known in that spelling and with the meaning of a certain winner from the 1930s. It came from horse racing, where a shoo-in was the winner of a rigged race.

In turn that seems to have come from the verb shoo, meaning to drive a person or an animal in a given direction by making noises or gestures, which in turn comes from the noise people often make when they do it.”

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