Comment on !football@sopuli.xyz , for football fans (the one where you touch ball wit your foot)
CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI feel like you’re starting to understand why saying soccer should be called football, a term denoting a game played on foot, is needlessly confusing and underspecified, whereas soccer, which is very specific and unambiguous, is the much superior term.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks 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:
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png
It would not do anything except make the situation even more complicated.
CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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: books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=football&ye…
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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?