• leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      19 hours ago

      If you called gridiron gridiron instead of football no one would have to clarify either.

      There’s about 3.1 billion¹ more fans of football (or football association) than of gridiron (or gridiron football, or American football, or handegg), so it’s evident to everyone except Americans which one is the default.

      (Not to mention one is an entertaining sport while the other is an ad delivery system built around watching people whose only allowed path to education is to enslave themselves to corporations suffer permanent brain injuries).


      1.— Using the American puny billion here (a thousand million) instead of the proper one (a million million) because like so many other harmful or inferior stuff you Americans have managed to force it into an international standard and would complain I was being confusing if I used the proper word.

      • CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        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.

        • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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          21 hours ago

          Let’s just use “football” as an umbrella term for all games played on foot

          There goes baseball, handball, volleyball, and pretty much every other game involving balls that isn’t played in wheelchairs.

          • CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world
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            21 hours ago

            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.

            • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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              20 hours ago

              ‘football’ as a name has been around for centuries with no confusion, until American exceptionalism led to them inventing their own version of the game. The only confusion today is coming from the US. Your proposed change however, is the equivalent of this:

              It would not do anything except make the situation even more complicated.

      • CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        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.

        • remon@ani.social
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          18 hours ago

          There is football and there is american football. Nothing confusing about it.

          • CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world
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            14 hours ago

            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.

          • CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world
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            21 hours ago

            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…