TheOctonaut

I’m not claiming that every individual calling it soccer was posh or indeed tried to sound posh. But that’s how it stuck in America, where there was no working class attachment to “football” to contend with, and why it sounds weird to European ears. It’s also a useful distinguishing word from… soccer because other football exists. Gaelic football where I’m from, Aussie Rules, and for reasons best unexplored, that game where Americans only allow one specific guy to kick the ball

These are shibboleths more than abbreviations but I guess soccer is both.

Actually this misses vital context (shock).

Football was the name of the game for hundreds of years among the common people.

Then at prestigious boarding schools, it became codified and gentrified as “association football”. Posh (read: elitist) slang often abbreviates things to -er. Hence (a)socc-er. The same applied to rubgy (fully originated in elitist schools) which is shortened to “rugger”. As in “rugger bugger”.

So Americans are using the pretentious, elitist, never in common usage term, which they settled on either because of Americans thinking they were being worldly or because posh kids were the people that could travel to the US and influence things there.

“A” as a prefix means “without”, in Greek ironically. -phobic words aren’t made by sticking whatever you’d call a thing in front of the suffix “phobic”. It’s not spiderphobia for example.

The Anc8ent Greeks literally made a wonder of the world for an asexual, aromantic goddess and put her in the main Olympian pantheon.

Fearless?