Perverted_Pirate said:
Hi there,
I talk with a fair number of people online and they bring up sports a lot. They really enjoy american futbol and we often talk about that and real football, the problem is that it gets annoying saying 'american futbol' and they really don't like it. So I'm trying to think of a subsitute name. Obviously I can't call it 'handegg' as it comes off insulting. They've taken to calling football 'footy'. So the best I have so far is 'pass ball'. Handball is already used so that's out of the picture. 'Soccer' is off limits as it's insulting(even if it's a bastardized version of a word a select few used to refer to football a long, long time ago).
Can you guys help me come up with a non-insulting term for american futbol?
Thanks!
American Rugby is often a term used. The relation between rugby and football is still quite strong, much stronger than -say- the relation between baseball and cricket. Really, the gigantic colonial opt-out known as the American Revolutionary War changed much between the cultures, not just the take on sports rules, but also spellings and pronunciations, where these things remained much more strongly in other former British colonies like Australia and New Zealand. In a sense, Britain needed cultural and educational hegemony to maintain its dominance, while the States simply removed themselves earlier in that process.
The term soccer can be insulting, though not for the reasons you may think, and honestly, since it is an insult originally aimed at the British, as an American, I have no problem with using the term. You likely have heard the lie that 'soccer' stems from the term 'Association Football,' but I assure you that is not the case. The Oxenford dialects have no history of dropping the first letter of a word, especially when that letter is a vowel. The word 'Socar' first appeared in Gaeilege Eirie writings in the late 18th century, as a pun on the word 'Oscar,' meaning 'warrior.' Basically, it was a way for native Irish speakers to satirize British 'Sportsmen,' or the hunters who traveled all over the world to British colonies to shoot exotic animals with rifles -in a very Irish way- by flipping the first two letters of the word.
Eventually, The word made its way to Wales, Liverpool, and Oxford while becoming synonymous with the newer sports being played, not with hunting. To this day, most Irish speakers still prefer the term soccer to the term football -though it should be noted that using varying terms for any one thing is considered a form of wit among native Irish speakers, and thus both terms are used routinely. As for what I referred to as the "lie" that the word is an Oxford bastardization is simply due to either ignorance, or to the fact that the English have a long history of denying 'papist' influence on the language.
My point being this: the differences between sport names and also their rules is just another example of colonies and former colonies attempting to resist cultural hegemony. Which to be fair, can often be tremendously negative as a whole. Instead of asking why we cannot agree on a term, it is far more pertinent to ask why we need to agree in the first place. The burden of proof lies with those wishing to create universal terms throughout different cultures.
