Oh, I guess ha ha you really owned me by pretending to care about sports so you can clown on me about etymology or whatever. I’m just super upset that I got to talk about my favorite sport in the context of its entrance into the English language and its place in 19th century British class structure on the internet.
Right. You want to use the word football exclusively to refer to soccer because your goal is to be exclusionary. You don’t want those stupid Americans to talk about your favorite sport. But I really want to talk about soccer with y’all a lot, and it’s really frustrating that you are willing to discard this rich history and culture associated with the word soccer in favor of the word that British aristocrats used to distinguish themselves from working class soccer fans, and I find it very sad what you’re willing to sacrifice just to keep me out of the conversation.
I have talked about the Sounders when I was supposed to be talking Seahawks and vice versa more times than I can count, so I’m not sure where you’re getting this “it’s not confusing” business from. The announcement of the community has to include a disclaimer so people don’t get confused. It’s very confusing and I see it confuse people constantly.
Maybe in terms of active vocabulary, but in terms of passive vocabulary ~100% of English speakers will recognize the ambiguity
If football refers to a single, specific, concrete sport, why do we use it to refer to Canadian rules football AND Gaelic rules football AND American football AND association football?
How certain are you about that? Looks to me like the term football is about 150 years old, and when it was introduced, gridiron and soccer were still the same sport: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=football&year_start=1500&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false
And I’m not proposing a new standard, I’m continuing use of a standard introduced by working class Brits in the early 20th century, so that xkcd really doesn’t apply at all.
I feel like you’re starting to understand why saying soccer should be called football, a term denoting a game played on foot as opposed to on horseback, is needlessly confusing and underspecified, whereas soccer, which is very specific and unambiguous, is the much superior term.
I feel like you think that’s some kind of crazy own, but manifestly yes, that is correct. I don’t chat politics much, so that one doesn’t bother me as much, but I do talk a lot of soccer…
But you could, and it would certainly be less confusing than insisting on using the overloaded term “football.” Soccer is a grand old European term.
Great! Let’s just use “football” as an umbrella term for all games played on foot, like soccer, rugby, and gridiron. I’ll call “American football” gridiron and you’ll call “European football” soccer and no-one will be confused.
Also you don’t have to lecture me about how many soccer fans there are; I absolutely guarantee you I’ve attended more soccer matches than you have.
If you called it soccer instead you wouldn’t have to clarify
Fresno? More like Fresyes!