Here is a question you may have heard lately: Why do Americans call it soccer when the rest of the world calls it football? Well, thanks to an article from Tony Manfred in Business Insider, here is an explanation. While calling the worlds most popular sport soccer is typically depicted as a symbol of American ignorance, the reason we dont call it football like the rest of the world is Britains fault. The word soccer is a British invention that British people stopped using only about 30 years ago, according to a new paper by University of Michigan professor Stefan Szymanski. The word soccer comes from the use of the term association football in Britain and goes back 200 years. In the early 1800s, a bunch of British universities took football —a medieval game —and started playing their own versions of it, all under different rules. To standardize things across the country, these games were categorized under different organizations with different names. One variant of the game you played with your hands became rugby football. Another variant came to be known as association football after the Football Association formed to promote the game in 1863, 15 years after the rules were made at Cambridge. Rugby football became rugger for short. Association football became soccer. After these two sports spread across the Atlantic, Americans invented their own variant of the game that they simply called football in the early 1900s. Association football became soccer in America, and what was called gridiron in Britain became simply football in America. The interesting thing here is that Brits still used soccer regularly for a huge chunk of the 20th century. Between 1960 and 1980, soccer and football were almost interchangeable in Britain, Szymanski found. Then everything changed (via Szymanski): Since 1980 the usage of the word soccer has declined in British publications, and where it is used, it usually refers to an American context. This decline seems to be a reaction against the increased usage in the US which seems to be associated with the highpoint of the NASL around 1980. British people stopped saying soccer because of its American connotations. So, no, its not wrong to call it soccer if youre American.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 20:38:15 +0000
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