> and especially the football vs. soccer thing with the world cup right now

My favorite thing about this is that the term “soccer” originated in British English in the late 19th Century as an abbreviation for association football, yet we get blamed for what’s actually a useful term of distinction given the presence of a much more popular (domestically) football code.[1]

My second favorite thing is that apart from receiving the blame from the people we ought to be crediting for the term, is that even outside of America in other primarily English-speaking countries, “soccer” is the prevailing term for association football in Ireland, Australia[2], Canada & New Zealand[2]. Even in Puerto Rican Spanish and Canadian French. Despite this, America specifically gets blamed. This is easily one of the best century long psy-ops the world has ever seen. Even if we were actually alone in this though (and we’re not), as long as we keep calling it soccer, the prevailing English word is soccer, and the English language doesn’t owe any deference to another Indo-European language.

Sorry to the parent for the tangent. This is just an endless source of amusement to me how riled up soccer fans get about this difference in terminology.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soccer

[2] This is made complicated in Australia & New Zealand by the fact that the local governing bodies for soccer changed their official names and the way they refer to the sport to “football” around 20 years ago, but that didn’t overnight change the way people referred to soccer. Australia also has multiple sport codes that people colloquially call “football” and which “football” people mean is highly regional.

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SpecialistK 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And rugby is actually "Rugby Football," as I learned from the local Medway Rugby Football Club.

There's association football (soccer), rugby football, gridiron football (American and Canadian), Aussie rules football, and probably others either in certain niches or in the past. I've been calling the NFL and CFL "gridiron" exclusively for a few years to avoid any confusion.

	▲	SllX 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In Australia, Rugby League and Rugby Union can both be referred to as just “football”, though there are also other more distinctive terms for the sake of clarity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_Australia#Terminol... And they’re just two of the four major codes, two of the six if you include Gaelic football & gridiron which are both relatively minor.