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by JdeBP
1133 days ago
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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. (-: |
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