Rugby involves foot touching the ball. Sometimes.
If you called it soccer instead you wouldn’t have to clarify
If you called gridiron gridiron instead of football no one would have to clarify either.
There’s about 3.1 billion¹ more fans of football (or football association) than of gridiron (or gridiron football, or American football, or handegg), so it’s evident to everyone except Americans which one is the default.
(Not to mention one is an entertaining sport while the other is an ad delivery system built around watching people whose only allowed path to education is to enslave themselves to corporations suffer permanent brain injuries).
1.— Using the American puny billion here (a thousand million) instead of the proper one (a million million) because like so many other harmful or inferior stuff you Americans have managed to force it into an international standard and would complain I was being confusing if I used the proper word.
Great! Let’s just use “football” as an umbrella term for all games played on foot, like soccer, rugby, and gridiron. I’ll call “American football” gridiron and you’ll call “European football” soccer and no-one will be confused.
Also you don’t have to lecture me about how many soccer fans there are; I absolutely guarantee you I’ve attended more soccer matches than you have.
Let’s just use “football” as an umbrella term for all games played on foot
There goes baseball, handball, volleyball, and pretty much every other game involving balls that isn’t played in wheelchairs.
I feel like you’re starting to understand why saying soccer should be called football, a term denoting a game played on foot as opposed to on horseback, is needlessly confusing and underspecified, whereas soccer, which is very specific and unambiguous, is the much superior term.
‘football’ as a name has been around for centuries with no confusion, until American exceptionalism led to them inventing their own version of the game. The only confusion today is coming from the US. Your proposed change however, is the equivalent of this:
It would not do anything except make the situation even more complicated.
How certain are you about that? Looks to me like the term football is about 150 years old, and when it was introduced, gridiron and soccer were still the same sport: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=football&year_start=1500&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false
And I’m not proposing a new standard, I’m continuing use of a standard introduced by working class Brits in the early 20th century, so that xkcd really doesn’t apply at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)
It’s been around for almost a millennia.
And I’m not proposing a new standard, I’m continuing use of a standard introduced by working class Brits in the early 20th century, so that xkcd really doesn’t apply at all.
It means something specific TODAY. You’re suggesting to have it mean something new and different. It doesn’t matter if that meaning was used a century ago, that’s not what the comic is referencing.
So not handegg?
I’m afraid not
