This will be my only post relevant to this year's World Cup.
"... in its early days, football was a very "posh" sport. "The people who founded the Football Association in England in 1863 were Oxford graduates who had attended elite public schools," he said. The game played under Football Association rules became known as "association football", wrote John M Cunningham in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The name also helped distinguish it from another popular sport: rugby...Among wealthy university students in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a habit of shortening words and adding "-er" to the end, creating a kind of slang. "So instead of saying 'breakfast,' they would say 'brekker'." Applied to rugby, they would call it "rugger."..It appears that these inventive students took "soc" from the middle of the word "association" and added "-er," producing "soccer". "Obviously, no-one knows for certain, but what people are sure about is that it comes from Oxford. There are many documentary sources confirming that it was a word coined by students there."
More information at the source article at the BBC.
I imagine both soccer and 'rugger' came from the elite schools.
ReplyDeleteReckon the hoi polloi were far too busy fighting off poverty, plague, and pestilence to have time to inflate sheep's bladders, let alone coat them in dead cow skin and kick it around the local church's vacant cemetery field.
That coal wasn't to extract itself from underground you know.
Rats, rickets, and rations, not rugby and flash boots.
Adorable that you think the toffs were making their own balls.
DeleteI'm sure you're aware of the origins of football in Europe. So-called "mob football" that could involve hundred of players on either side. Very much a peasant sport. Association football was actually adopted very quickly by the unwashed masses, as in within years of the formal rules being written up.
The relationship of the word “association “ to “soccer” seems inflated.
ReplyDeleteGiven the use of the word in the U.S. and not elsewhere, I suggest the term “soccer” developed here, though I cannot suggest a credible source. Perhaps it is another one of the misheard or misunderstood words we have, like “kangaroo” or a mondegreen.
This from the BBC link: "Sports historian Andy Mitchell has pointed to "at least" three examples of "soccer" or "socker" appearing in school magazines in late 1885 in different parts of England." I trust the BBC on this matter.
Delete“Soccer” is definitely English, and it seems to be common knowledge here in Aus that it came from “association football”. It’s also how the sport is referred to down under: if you say “football” here, you’ll be understood as meaning either Rugby League (in Queensland, the A.C.T. & New South Wales), Australian Football (everywhere else in Australia), or Rugby Union (New Zealand). The only people here who use the term “football” to mean soccer are either British expats, or vehement soccer fans who insist on reclaiming the term for their own sport.
DeleteI follow all three above-mentioned codes closely, and also played them all extensively when I still had a functioning body, but don’t really have a strong opinion on preferred terms for any of them. The argument is often made that soccer is the sole deserving sport worthy of the term “football” as it’s the only sport that (mostly) outlaws the use of the hands and arms in general play, but I think that’s conveniently ignoring the fact that up to a quarter of goals scored in professional leagues are scored with the head. Also, chesting the ball is a vastly important skill to have, as is throwing… Australia’s first ever goal at a World Cup finals tournament in 2006 was scored after a “long throw” specialist, Lucas Neill, was employed to attack the goal from the sideline, purely by the use of his hands. None of them are purely “football”, all of them can use the term fairly, IMO.