Soccer Explained
As you may have noticed by the fact that I write about "gasoline" and "labor", instead of "petrol" and "labour", I try to use American English, rather than British. The reason for that is that there are a lot more Americans than Britons, both in the world and more importantly among my readers. However, in one case I personally have something with the American word and prefer the British, namely with regard to what Americans call "soccer" and Britons call "football".
I like the British word much better, not just or even primarily because it is more similar to the Swedish word (fotboll), but because you in that game actually strictly use the foot (except for rare occasions when the ball bounces on the head), whereas in what Americans call football, they seem to mostly use the hands to move the ball. American "football" is thus more like a version of rugby than anything properly called football given the normal meaning of "foot" and "ball".
Anyway, despite this, I write "football"/"soccer" just for clarity so I won't be misunderstood on the rare occasions I write about the sport. One thing that long puzzled me was why Americans call it soccer. If I had put my mind to it, I would have easily been able to find out, but I never did as I didn't think much about it and to the extent I did maybe thought that there was no particular reason for it, and that someone perhaps simply made it up.
Today, however, I found out why Americans call football soccer. It is explained in the below video by a really hot 27-year old Russian woman by the name of Marina Orlova, who apart from nice curves also has two degrees in philology and has made a career by launching youtube-videos explaining the origin of words by the motto "intelligence is sexy". Her videos has 92 million youtube-views and counting. If you want to see more of her videos got to her website or click on the embedded video, which will take you to the youtubeurl where it is shown and where there are links to other videos explaining the origin of other words (including why the popular Russian invention known as the AK-47 is called the AK-47).
I like the British word much better, not just or even primarily because it is more similar to the Swedish word (fotboll), but because you in that game actually strictly use the foot (except for rare occasions when the ball bounces on the head), whereas in what Americans call football, they seem to mostly use the hands to move the ball. American "football" is thus more like a version of rugby than anything properly called football given the normal meaning of "foot" and "ball".
Anyway, despite this, I write "football"/"soccer" just for clarity so I won't be misunderstood on the rare occasions I write about the sport. One thing that long puzzled me was why Americans call it soccer. If I had put my mind to it, I would have easily been able to find out, but I never did as I didn't think much about it and to the extent I did maybe thought that there was no particular reason for it, and that someone perhaps simply made it up.
Today, however, I found out why Americans call football soccer. It is explained in the below video by a really hot 27-year old Russian woman by the name of Marina Orlova, who apart from nice curves also has two degrees in philology and has made a career by launching youtube-videos explaining the origin of words by the motto "intelligence is sexy". Her videos has 92 million youtube-views and counting. If you want to see more of her videos got to her website or click on the embedded video, which will take you to the youtubeurl where it is shown and where there are links to other videos explaining the origin of other words (including why the popular Russian invention known as the AK-47 is called the AK-47).
posted by stefankarlsson at 8:00 PM
2 Comments:
Personally, I think american "english" is a savaged, primitive version of the language. But that's just me. :D
First and foremost, I believe congress should move to reinstate the letter "u" into the alphabet, like in "favour", "labour" etc.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blrevocation_cleese.htm
You, you statist British SNOB!!! :-)
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