[Izkata]

Not a joke, the article converted from meters to feet so the demographic limitation is ~the same. Don't know why the title on HN uses metres, the original title doesn't have any size.

I only included "American" because I knew someone would jump on it with soccer/non-American football fields.

[speedgoose]

Alright. The American obsession to use random things instead of the international system of units is weird and funny so I thought you were joking about it.

[rbanffy]

> I knew someone would jump on it with soccer/non-American football fields.

There is no such thing as "soccer". The correct name is "football", because you use your feet to move the ball inside the field during the game.

There is also American football, which is an entirely different game, that's neither played with feet, or a ball.

;-P

[JdeBP]

I've made the same joke that "Rules" is so named because it doesn't have any. (-:

Having had the "soccer is what Americans call it" mantra drummed in from an early age, I was very interested to learn, only very recently, that "soccer" for Association Football has the same English upper-class slang roots as "rugger" for Rugby Football, and it's not actually an Americanism at all, as checking some old dictionaries from the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as Notes and Queries has since confirmed.

Partridge actually has a name for it, the "Oxford -er"; hence "topper" for "top hat", "header" for "heading a ball", "diner" for "dining car", "camper" for "camping car", and so forth.

So one should dislike it for the right reasons: not because it's an Americanism, which it isn't in the first place, but because it's an invention of 19th century Oxbridge toffs who stuck "-er" after the first syllable of everything as a social-class shibboleth. (-:

[CydeWeys]

You might do well to read up on the history of asSOCiation football.

[rbanffy]

I was joking.