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>Only recently have I noticed a trend to condemn it as 'American', and if anything is sure to bring out a rather nasty, old-fashioned snob in some English people, it's being 'American'. Similarly, until 1980 "soccer" and "football" were interchangeably used in Britain (http://ns.umich.edu/Releases/2014/June14/Its-football-not-so...), when "soccer" became less popular because of a mistaken belief that it is an Americanism. Not class reasons, as often claimed; this would be news to the millions who watch Soccer Saturday and Soccer AM. In the English-speaking world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)#National_usage , "football" is only unambiguously association football in Great Britain. In Ireland, "football" = Gaelic football or rugby union, and "soccer" is frequently used. In Australia, "football" = rugby, rugby league, or Australian rules. In New Zealand, "football" = rugby or association football. In South Africa, association football is called "soccer" as often as in the US. In Canada, "football" = American or Canadian football. In other words, among English speakers Brits are outnumbered—whether by population or number of major English-speaking countries—in terms of how they use "football". (Italy uses "calcio", which means "kick". Yet, for some strange reason Italians never ever get criticized for not calling the sport "football" or some other language's variant of that word, nor do self-loathingly pretentious Italians feel the need to call the sport by its "correct" name; strange, that.) |
Not really. Football means soccer, people normally say "GAA" to mean Gaelic football (its an acronym, Gaelic athletics association). The word soccer isn't used much. Source: I'm Irish.