I'm not going to watch France vs Swizterland tonight

[chani]

It's gonna be the big telly event tonight since it's the last chance for the French team to get a ticket for the World Cup, but I really don't care about football. Was it Rugby that would be another story.

So instead of beaming because of Zizou's skills I'll probably be reading. But afterfrances_lievens 's faux-pas of yesterday ( ;- )) I wondered about that American word that is soccer. I was toying with the poetic idea that soccer might come from socks and would have been a metonymy to call football.

For those who don't know, a metonymy is a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated. In this case socks for foot...

But I've just found the etymology of the word and I was completely wrong. Soccer is an alteration of assoc., abbreviation of association football. Just the usual American habit of shortening names! Just slang then.

There's definitely no poetry in the world of football.

ETA because I was dumb enough to write Swiss instead of Switzerland

Comments

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I love that you looked up the etymology of soccer. I'm like that as well.

Not sure whether this qualifies as poetry, but I love the different words for table football and it was invented by a poet, more details here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_football).
In German it's Kicker and the Americans call it foosball which sounds just like our word for football. I like the French word, too: baby-foot.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

How neat!

I did't know that baby-foot was connected to the Spanish civil war!

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

We call it "kikkeren", which is pretty strange actually, because a kikker is a frog. (But it prolly should be, like in German, a kicker and kickeren as the verb.)

I'm so bad at table football. But I'm very bad at any kind of café game. Don't ask me to play pool or anything, because frankly, I can't.