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

[kazzy-cee.livejournal.com]

It think that the word 'soccer' originated in England, and because American football was called football, they called English rules football soccer to show the difference. Over in the UK we tend to call it football (or footie) and soccer just to confuse the issue.

[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]

Here's what I found:

Soccer is an abbreviation for Association Football. The Football Association was formed in London in October 1863 when representatives of eleven clubs and schools met in an attempt to standardize the rules of the game. One of the rules prohibited the carrying of the ball, a rule that would lead to the Rugby-oriented clubs leaving the Association several months later. The name Association Football was coined to distinguish it from Rugby.

By 1889, the abbreviation socca' was in use, and the spelling soccer had made its appearance by 1895.

So yes it was probably British slang first, but the American kept that slang to call something that the whole planet actually calls football.

[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.