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?
~100% of English speakers will recognize the ambiguity
Everybody outside of said countries will consider ‘football’ to refer to, well, football, without any ambiguity. They may be aware Americans are idiots about it but it’s not something that comes up in daily conversation.
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 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
Everybody outside of said countries will consider ‘football’ to refer to, well, football, without any ambiguity. They may be aware Americans are idiots about it but it’s not something that comes up in daily conversation.
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.