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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
It means something specific TODAY. You’re suggesting to have it mean something new and different. It doesn’t matter if that meaning was used a century ago, that’s not what the comic is referencing.
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?
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.
There goes baseball, handball, volleyball, and pretty much every other game involving balls that isn’t played in wheelchairs.
Hey,
Small advice: don’t feed the troll
Oh well. He didn’t really have a leg to stand on, so I was just taking some cheap shots at the Americans ☺️
And hey, it keeps your announcement post up in the active feed!
That person also qualified a 20 years old player as a “child” https://piefed.zip/post/511068
Yeah, that’s the pro I guess!
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.
‘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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)
It’s been around for almost a millennia.
It means something specific TODAY. You’re suggesting to have it mean something new and different. It doesn’t matter if that meaning was used a century ago, that’s not what the comic is referencing.
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?
‘we’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, considering that’s like 5% of the world population that would refer to it that way.
Maybe in terms of active vocabulary, but in terms of passive vocabulary ~100% of English speakers will recognize the ambiguity