We actually covered this issue last year, but Steve Hendricks (who “watches Manchester City and FC Barcelona from Boulder, Colorado”) has written such an enjoyable piece about it, full of both footnotes and jokes, that I can’t resist posting it. A sample of his style:
I should explain that it turned up at Oxford, not Old Hall, because although it was first printed in The Oldhallian, it was penned at Oxford. The penner was an anonymous Old Hall alumnus (who, were there any justice in the world, would be called an Old Oldhallian but instead is a mere Old Hallian, or so say the killjoys at the school) who had alighted at Exeter College, Oxford, and was sending back dispatches on university doings to his old schoolmates. In his letter of December 1885, after wishing Old Hallians who had gone to Cambridge “every success notwithstanding their bad choice”, he reported that the ’Varsity lost to Aston Villa in what “was pre-eminently the most important ‘Socker’ game played in Oxford this term”—a phrase remarkable not only for the first use of soccer but for the last use, so far as scholars of the field have determined, of preeminently important to describe a game played at Oxford.
He ends with an offer to return “soccer” to the Brits when they decide they want it back “as freely as a Tom Cruise blockbuster”; “In return we ask only that, next time, you send a single Agüero instead of two Wright-Phillipses.”
What does he mean, “freely”? The makers of Tom Cruise blockbusters make them pay through the nose for it!
In any case, if Americans had invented the word they would never have spelled it with a silent r, though as with Burma, Sadé, etc., they now pronounce the /r/.
I ranted about the Sade issue here not long ago. Though even if Americans had invented the term on their own, I think it’s still likely that they might have picked “soccer” over “socca”.
I doubt it would have been either: more likely we’d write it assoc and pronouncing it /əˈsoʊʃ/.
“So, the cowardly swine are frightened of El Heneral Aston Villa!”
The Goons, “Foiled by President Fred”
“Since at least the 18th century, some Britons had been calling a potato a tater and a pinafore a pinner.” — author hasn’t allowed for r-dropping
“the pinny that soccer players put on over their game shirts when warming up” — always called this a bib, ir is there a difference? It’s a type of garment that’s not important enough to enough people for a standard name to emerge quickly.
“what would drive a fellow to lift the soc from Association and change its sound from /sohsh/ to /sock/ before adding the er. ” — the social secretary of college clubs was the Soc Sec, pronounced as spelt.
“Since at least the 18th century, some Britons had been calling a potato a tater and a pinafore a pinner.” — author hasn’t allowed for r-dropping
Not sure what you mean; the r is dropped equally in “tater” and “soccer.”
Sorry, I overcompressed my point, which was that /ˈpɪnəfɔr/->/ˈpɪnə/ and /pəˈteɪtə/*–>/ˈteɪtə/ are better analysed as simple clippings of 3 to 2 syllables, rather than as clippings of 3 to 1 syllable followed by addition of -er. Therefore the putative antedating of the -er suffix is unconvincing.
*Of course /pəˈteɪtə/ rather than /pəˈteɪtoʊ/ is nonstandard, but no more than /ˈteɪtə/
As it happens I just realized the other day that a lyric from a song I’ve been listening to for 30+ years is rather less surreal (and less interesting) if understood in a BrEng sense rather than an AmEng sense, with my own hearing of the text perhaps having failed to take conscious account of the relevant fact that the songwriter and performers are all Brits. The lines are “And all the world is football-shaped / It’s just for me to kick in space,” from “Senses Working Overtime,” performed by XTC and written by its Andy Partridge. (In a later verse the world is “biscuit-shaped,” which may also be more boring given the BrEng sense of “biscuit.”)
I doubt it would have been either: more likely we’d write it assoc and pronouncing it /əˈsoʊʃ/.
You’d probably be calling it “American Football” and the other one “Ruggsby” (in the face of European objections that it should clearly be called “Hander”).
NB also that the rival teen factions in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (set in the early/mid-60’s in Oklahoma, sez wiki) are the Greasers and the Socs, and the latter is not pronounced “socks” but /soʊˈʃəz/.
Did you mean /ˈsoʊʃəz/?
doug of etymonline has a good history of “soccer” usage:
Ouch!
This colonial-cringe denigration of American football from 1905 was rapidly overtaken by events, because the game was in the throes of reform facilitated by the busybody President of the United States, and it was just the following year that the reformed game (which eventually turned out to have a different rhythm and pace and points of spectator interest) debuted, with the first intentional-and-legal forward pass being thrown on Sept. 5, 1906 by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradbury_Robinson. (Spoiler: it was incomplete. But the second one resulted in a touchdown.)
Were there no fouls in those days?
“Rugby is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen; soccer is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans.”
The other thing that’s been overtaken by events is most received opinion about soccer in the US. It’s the second biggest sport in the country by participation figures and the US game three weeks ago was watched by more Americans than the NBA final it competed with, despite that game getting infinitely more coverage.
I recently read a forum post from some mystified European. He had come here on vacation and hoped to play American football while here. People were explaining to him that no adults actually play football, and that there are far more adults playing soccer here than most other team sports.
Gone are the days when announcers spent half the game explaining offsides.
He had come here on vacation and hoped to play American football while here.
Ha! I never thought about it, but it’s true: we don’t play it, we only watch it. (For values of “we” that exclude me — I have no interest in it.)
There is a difference between mass sport, where ordinary people play (perhaps even pay to play) and elite sport, where ordinary people watch (perhaps even pay to watch). Some sports flourish in both mass and elite versions, others only in one or the other.
I read some years back about someone who had played a few years in the NFL in one of the low-prestige blocking positions, and two decades after retiring joined some neighbourhood team in an amateur casual friendly low-contact version of the game, where he surprised his oblivious teammates being so athletic for a big guy and played in a high-prestige scoring position. All of which is to prove that “we don’t play it, we only watch it” is not 100% accurate.
Millions of anglophone monoglot Americans watching soccer in Spanish. Article by the Associated Press, but I link to this version because 1) I’m too lazy to try to find it on the AP website and 2) the comments back the article up.
The “pure” version of American/Canadian football is sufficiently physically grueling that not too many people want to play it for fun when they are no longer youthful, but in terms of mass participation the number of Americans who *used* to play it is not insubstantial – probably somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the adult male population (excluding immigrants who didn’t grow up here) played on an organized high school team and more played some less organized playground version.
As mollymooly implies, lots of older folks who feel too creaky for full-contact football will still play, typically in very casual/informal contexts, touch football or flag football. Two anecdata points:
1. Part of the Kennedy dynastic mythos involved the family tradition (often performed before journalists) of intra-family touch football games at big get-togethers in Hyannisport. Back in 2017, the courtiers charged with tending the official JFK cultus tried to organize a nationwide series of touch football games to mark the 100th anniversary of his nativity. https://jfklegacy.org/events/centennial_touch_football_games
2. When offstage, the late Bobby Weir of the Grateful Dead was an obsessive participant in the San-Francisco-Bay area old-guy flag-football scene, and turned out to be That Guy that you sometimes encounter in such contexts who was just a little too intense and a little too organized about a pastime that most participants wanted to keep simple and low-key. https://www.si.com/nfl/bob-weir-grateful-dead-bay-area-flag-football-dynasty
I’m not sure logistically how you would get a random German tourist invited to a casual pick-up touch football game, but it would be a nice bit of cultural outreach. Touch/flag are generally very much what mollymooly calls “mass” in that however many people play, no one else pays to watch them play. Efforts have been afoot to make flag more organized and regimented and potentially money-generating, and it’s apparently going to be a demonstration sport at the 2028 Olympics. It has the advantage in that context of being playable by women as well as men.
American football was invented by Americans so that they would at least have one sport that they were better than anyone else at. Apart from Rounders, that is.
(Runs away very quickly …)
Poker, too.
Poker? I barely… oh, never mind.
@Ryan: The other thing that’s been overtaken by events is most received opinion about soccer in the US. It’s the second biggest sport in the country by participation figures and the US game three weeks ago was watched by more Americans than the NBA final it competed with, despite that game getting infinitely more coverage.
Second-biggest competitive recreational sport by participation? Among all ages? Just team sports?
Where would I find these numbers? I haven’t been having any success.
Interesting about the comparison to the NBA game.
I recently read a forum post from some mystified European. He had come here on vacation and hoped to play American football while here. People were explaining to him that no adults actually play football,
Overall I agree. For an exception, the last I heard about adults playing football was at the gym almost twenty years ago. A muscular young man told me he had tried out for a local team (I think this was tackle football), and was told to do some wind sprints. He was then told he wasn’t in good-enough shape and needed to improve before he could play, which he decided he didn’t want to do. I hadn’t heard about whatever team that was before and haven’t since. Incidentally, he might not have qualified as an adult. He was probably over 18, but I couldn’t guess whether he was over 21, or beyond “traditional college age”.
Tackle football has a pretty high risk of injuries, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to try it as an adult without even having played touch before. That probably limits it to serious people, and of course to play seriously you have to be in really good shape.
and that there are far more adults playing soccer here than most other team sports.
Well, there are a lot of other team sports. To look at the competitors for most popular, are there more adults playing soccer than volleyball? Do baseball and softball count separately? Touch football and flag football? Do doubles tennis, pickleball, and yes, ping-pong count as team sports? And again, who counts as an adult, and where would I find these numbers?
@J.W.B.: probably somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the adult male population (excluding immigrants who didn’t grow up here) played on an organized high school team and more played some less organized playground version.
More indeed. I’d estimate without any calculations than 90 percent of adult male native-born Americans have played some kind of American football, even if it was the one-on-one touch football my brother and I played on the front lawn when we were small and no other players were available. (We also played one-on-one soccer… and “baseball”? “Imaginary men on first and second.”)
Part of the Kennedy dynastic mythos involved the family tradition (often performed before journalists) of intra-family touch football games at big get-togethers in Hyannisport
Setting up a memorable moment in the TV series M*A*S*H.
Poker? I barely… oh, never mind.
You might want to see a doctor about that.
Poker? I barely… oh, never mind.
Now this brought me to M*A*S*H (only sound, too lazy to search for visuals).
American football was invented by Americans so that they would at least have one sport that they were better than anyone else at.
It is said about English that as soon as someone beats them at their favo(u)rite game, they invent a new one.
American football was invented by Americans so that they would at least have one sport that they were better than anyone else
Ice Hockey (sorry Canada)
It is quite traditional in Anglophone societies to have your own dialect of football that is difficult for outsiders to become fluent in. Gaelic football and Australian Rules are other prominent examples, although there is admittedly a methodological problem in determining whether Canadians are actually better at playing Canadian football than Americans are. (They probably would be on a per-capita basis, but that’s hard to test empirically.)
The Welsh were not innovative enough to actually invent rugby, but they did in time get better at it than the English, and not only on a per-capita basis.
The secret is to have orthopaedic surgeons as full-backs.