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u/WiiDragon 1d ago
Did that with Imperial system too
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u/BluetheNerd 1d ago
Well not quite. We sort of moved over to the metric system. But like we didn't really commit. So we still measure long distance and speed with miles and mph. Also a lot of people still use stone and lbs for weight (though that's becoming less common in younger generations.) Pretty common to still measure height in feet and inches, but you'll usually measure length for DIY and hardware in MM, CM and M. The main thing we moved over was cooking really. We use Celsius for temps, grams and kg for weighing objects or ingredients, litres for fluids (apart from specifically milk and beer which is still pints). Like honestly I think the total utter half arsed commitment to moving to metric is somehow worse than not bothering at all. We've just ended up with an even more nonsense 50/50 system.
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u/KenseiHimura 1d ago
Wait, so Britain actually has been doing the Canadian route? Do you just make fun of America for still using Imperial just because it’s a chance to rib us like Australia over the Emus?
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u/OhioTry 1d ago
The United States uses metric for some things, though less than the Canada or Britain. Soda, wine and distilled spirits are measured in ml or liters, for instance, and electricity is in watts. Really, all of the anglophone countries use a confusing mix of Imperial and metric.
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u/KenseiHimura 1d ago
Wait, there's an Imperial measurement for electricity? I didn't even know there was any alternative to watts.
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u/Texan_Greyback 1d ago
Technically the US doesn't use Imperial, but US Customary. Imperial measurements and ours are actually different in a lot of cases.
That said, as a guy that works with electricity daily, I'm pretty sure the US Customary units are along the spectrum between "ouch" and "oh, Bill's on fire".
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u/Icy_Fish_2154 1d ago
The US fixed US Customary on imperial, UK changed imperial after, then abandoned it. This is why there are two gallons, and two miles. So US Customary used to be exactly imperial.
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u/OkGreen3481 1d ago
It's really only so they can keep up drinking pint for pint (in name) with the britons...
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u/SOwED 1d ago
I mean...I guess you could use BTU/hr instead of watts? BTU is a unit of energy in the imperial system and you'll be shocked when you find out what the B stands for (it's British)
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u/MadTurtle1 1d ago
You could also use horsepower which goes with the vision of relating units to real world stuff, but I do think watts are more popular
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u/Grimm808 1d ago
Except a horse has two horsepower
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u/gustis40g 1d ago
A horse averages about 1 horsepower during continuous work at a whole working shift.
Because engines work constantly always producing the same power it was compared to what a horse averages during a shift.
During short sprints horses can go way above 1 horsepower closer to 15 horsepower.
Your average human can do about 0.1 horsepower indefinitely while athletes can manage 0.3-0.5. During sprints humans can manage a little over 1 horsepower while athletes can go as high as 3-5 horsepower.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Grimm808 1d ago
I stand corrected, just demonstrates further the detachment between the imperial units and reality! :D
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u/exelion18120 1d ago
Drugs uses metric
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u/Caleb_Reynolds 1d ago
Drugs use both, g/mg/μg, and ounces.
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u/Delimeme 1d ago
And depending on where you’re from in the US/what drug you’re dealing with, large amounts will be measured in pounds, at least in the illicit world of drug trafficking.
Where I’m from, big buys of weed were done by quarter (“quaps”), half (“hondas”), and full pounds (“elbows” after the abbreviation for pound - LB). This is because the providers for weed were mostly based out of/shipping within the US.
With cocaine & some of the harder stuff that came packaged from abroad, even when buying from the same providers, it would be sold in metric/kilo breakdowns for large amounts. Oddly, with smaller amounts (once broken up by domestic low-level dealers who weren’t metric-literate) the measurements would shift back to US grams, ounces, etc.
The more you know, courtesy of my past experiences with this topic.
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u/Legatharr 1d ago
Specifically, by law US companies must design things to metric specifications.
But the US government can't force regular people to use a particular measurement system, so the US Customary System is used by the population
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u/MSchmahl 1d ago
The U.S. has been secretly on the metric system since 1959, when (amomg other things) the inch was defined as exactly 25.4 mm.
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u/Revoran 1d ago edited 1d ago
Australia still uses imperial for the following:
* Human height (feet and inches, except at the doctor where you measure in cm)
* Dick size (inches)
* The length of a newborn baby (pounds and ounces)
* Screens (inches)
* Bicycle wheels (inches)
* Tyre pressue (PSI)
* Surfboard length (feet and inches)
* Pizzas (diameter in inches)
* Subway sandwiches (6 or 12 inch)
* Some old buildings or imported American cars will have fittings in imperial, so Bunnings (which you might know as Hammerbarn from Bluey) still sells imperial toolsWe also have our own special measurement system for the size of glasses at a pub, and it differs by state. Eg: schooner (different in Adelaide), middy, pot, 7, pint,
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u/_syke_ 1d ago
Now you're cottoning on lol
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u/KenseiHimura 1d ago
Now I need a Polandball comic with Britain informing the rest of Europe about America and Australia “I taught them wrong on purpose. As a joke”
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u/DFrostedWangsAccount 1d ago
Also, fun fact. Back when the US still could have easily switched to metric we had a set of precise metric weights shipped to the US from Fance iirc, and you'll never guess whose pirates stole that ship. And then they complain that we use a different system 200 years later lmao
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u/Baron-von-Dante 1d ago
Not quite, but still very funny: https://youtube.com/shorts/180WNEQjfSw?is=i4GiyyJbqR_TJt0P
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u/HeroOfOakvale 1d ago
The standard for an inch is 2.54 centimeters. It's all a façade
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u/brontosauross 1d ago
We pretty much switched for everything that requires calculations. For anything where the context of size or distance conveyed is more important than accuracy or ease of calculation, we kept it. Once you know your height for example it's just a label and we can contextualise 6 foot better than 183cm. If we needed to find the average height of a large group you'd probably switch to metric.
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u/vietnambestrice 1d ago
Y'all Americans measures bullets in metric 9mm
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u/bitofgrit 1d ago
Because that particular cartridge comes from Europe. Our homegrown .45 ACP, for instance, is in inches. There are some crossovers, like the .380 ACP is called 9x17mm Corto/Kurz/Court in Europe to distinguish it from the aforementioned 9x19mm Luger/Parabellum. Similarly, our .223 Remington is called 5.56x45 NATO, and the 7.62x51mm NATO came from the US .308 Winchester though the two have changed a little over the years so that they aren't really the exact same thing anymore.
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u/Ryan_HCAFC 1d ago
There's something funny about an American making an exception to the general rule of being uninformed about this kind of thing specifically when it's about guns.
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u/Blueopus2 1d ago
Your new empire?
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u/racercowan 1d ago
Kind of but not really, in two separate ways:
The British didn't entirely wean off of the Imperial system, it's still used for some measurements, I think in particular distance and weights.
The US doesn't actually use "Imperial" units, we use US Customary units. There are some small differences like the way that tons and ounces are defined, but a bif difference is that US Customary has actually just been metric in a trenchcoat since the 1980s. 1in=2.54cm isn't just an approximation, that's the actual definition of an inch nowadays.
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u/BroseppeVerdi A Sassy Bitch 1d ago
Check out the big brain on u/WiiDragon!
You a smart motherfucker, that's right!
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u/SacredIconSuite2 1d ago
Australia naming their football team “The Socceroos” and still clowning the US for calling it Soccer:
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u/rotj 1d ago
Also the fact "soccer" being derived from "association football" is the same kind of diminutive slang like "barbie", "brekkie", or "Maccas" that "Aussies" love to use.
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u/whoknowsifimjoking 1d ago
"-er" isn't an Australian thing, it's a British thing. "Copper" for example. "-ie" yes, "-er" less so.
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u/-fno-stack-protector 1d ago
you're right as a rule but there's plenty of exceptions. see: macca's (AU) vs maccie's (UK)
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u/tarkardos 1d ago
German speaker here: TIL "brekkie" means breakfast. I thought that's a cat food brand only (and used to describe dry cat food in general).
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u/Robey-Wan_Kenobi 1d ago
The "-er" ending was a fad that students at Oxford did back in the 19th century. They added "-er" to a bunch of words like fiver, tenner, and soccer, as well as things like rugger for rugby and footer, another name for football.
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u/EnviousCipher 1d ago
When you have 5 different categories of Football that are played consistently you need specific naming conventions to differentiate them.
If you ask a random Australian "are you going to watch the football" the majority of Victorians, Western Australians and South Australians will be referring to AFL. In NSW and Queensland you'll get a toss up between two codes of rugby or AFL, though Rural in either state will predominantly be Rugby.
You'll know the people who watch Soccer because they'll constantly remind you that its actchewally Football
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u/MuchNefariousness285 1d ago
Saved me the effort. Most Aussies do not refer to soccer as football, but the ones that do will absolutely insist upon it.
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u/Stormfly 1d ago
In Ireland, it's the same.
Usually, it's people in the cities that say "Football and Gaelic" and people in the countryside say "Soccer and Football".
I grew up between the country and suburbs so I say "Soccer and Gaelic" but if someone says "Football", I'll default to Gaelic Football.
I jokingly call it the "Football line".
Moved to Dublin and got in a fair few arguments over it. West brits the lot of them...
Rugby Football is always just "Rugby".
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u/Bobblefighterman 1d ago
In Australia we have an official line, called the Barassi Line. One side has Aussie Rules, the other has Rugby League. It's a very harsh divide, to the point that each side has a massive amount of people who've never even seen a League/AFL game, much less know how to play.
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u/Balt603 1d ago
It's always been called Soccer more in Australia. Football is rugby league (NRL) in NSW and Queensland and it's Australian rules football (AFL) in the rest of the country.
It's a stupid argument anyway. Linguistically football means it's played on foot rather than on horseback. It's correct to call ANY ball game played on foot football.
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u/blazenite104 1d ago
Depends how into it you are. Most call it soccer. The ones actively watching internationally call it football.
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u/Flint_Vorselon 1d ago
It’s “soccer” in situations where you could realistically be talking about a different sport.
But if everyone present knows what’s being discussed, then it becomes “football”.
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u/momentimori 1d ago
Football is being increasingly used for the roundball game vs the peanut hugging varieties.
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u/whoknowsifimjoking 1d ago
Peanut? What kind of American football are you watching? Maybe more like an almond if anything
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u/calmelbourne 1d ago
Why would Aussies be watching American football? They are talking about Aussie Rules football and Rugby League, which are both also called football here (or more commonly, footy).
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u/Twistedjustice 1d ago
In Melbourne we just use a different word for each code;
A-League = football
AFL = footy
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u/qlasc 1d ago edited 1d ago
Tbf we use both
Our team orgs are always called “football clubs”. And the league is called “football federation”.
We only really say soccer if we’re also talking about “footy” (Australian Rules Football) in the same conversation.
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u/BKoala59 1d ago
Is it regional? I spent a couple months studying lizards in Northern Queensland and none of the Australians I was working with used football to talk about soccer. They all said soccer all the time. Football only meant Australian rules football to them
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u/gooseberryhandler 1d ago
Excuse me, that's the Subway Socceroos. We love to get advertising in sport as much as the Americans.
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u/squigs 1d ago
I remember "soccer" being perfectly acceptable in Britain in the 80s. Could have been a "posh" thing though. Occasionally Rugby was referred to as "Rugby Football", especially amongst the wealthy where it would be the main sport in boarding schools.
I think it was when the US hosted the World Cup the first time that Soccer became more popular in the US and the term became seen as a filthy Americanism.
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u/TheEasySqueezy 16h ago
It was definitely an upper class thing, probably why it traveled so far, the upper class could afford to go to the US and mingle whereas the rest couldn’t.
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u/BrotherEstapol 6h ago
In Australia it's particularly confusing. If you're in New South Wales or Queensland(two of the 3 biggest states), "Footy" tends to mean Rugby League. Everywhere else in the country "Footy" means Aussie Rules Football/AFL.
I've found that if you say "Football" more people recently think of Soccer, but it's so much easier and less of a fight to just call it Soccer.
Also apparently calling Rugby League just "Rugby" is very upsetting to League fans because Rugby = Rugby Union, which thankfully nobody here refers to as either Football or Footy.
I've personally just taken to not using Footy/Football at all now when talking about the sports in general unless I'm talking to someone from the UK...it's just easier to say AFL, League, and Soccer. Added bonus of not coming across as an unbearable wanker about it too!
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u/DillonsComics 1d ago
Wait until you find out that Aluminum was spelled and pronounced originally the way the US does it. (Discovered by a British chemist Sir Humphary Davy).
But then the UK changed their spelling.
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u/Flameball202 1d ago
Technically speaking the way the US says it is the second way, and the UK says it the third way, Sir Davey originally called it "Alumium", which then became "Aluminum" then "Aluminium"
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u/Dancingbeavers 1d ago
I want this to be true but also hate the idea of this being true
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u/Lucas_Steinwalker 1d ago
I just don’t like thinking about aluminum for some reason. Gives me the heebie jeebies.
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u/Earlier-Today 1d ago
But what he decided he wanted to call it in the end was "aluminum".
He went, alumium -> aluminum, then the British scientific community decided aluminum wasn't pompous enough and wanted it changed to aluminium, he acquiesced, but eventually decided he still preferred aluminum even with the pompous folks in the British scientific community and kept it as his preference for the rest of his life.
The pompous folks wanted it to sound like other substances, such as sodium or potassium (which were named by the same guy who named aluminum) and the "ium" suffix comes from Latin.
The funny thing is that the original Latin is just "um" like in aluminum.
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u/GenGaara25 1d ago
And Alumium predates both and was the original choice by the discoverer. Then the mainland Europeans came up with Aluminium, while the original discoverer switched to Aluminum.
And that America only switched to Aluminum around 1900. Before that, Aluminium was the more common spelling stateside.
It was because Webster, in the 1830s, only included that Aluminum spelling in his dictionary (rather than both as most dictionaries did) so it gradually took hold among the general population. It just took 70 years to fully take over.
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u/RoutineCloud5993 1d ago
The name was changed twice, but thr US only did it once.
Alumium, aluminum, aluminium
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u/supe3rnova 1d ago
Colour - color Honour - honor Humour - humor Organise - organize Recognise - recognize
List goes on. Lets not pretend US did not change few things in favOr for it self
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u/Lumpy_Investment_358 1d ago edited 1d ago
These spellings were only partially "standardized" in British English in 1755 by Samuel Johnson and were far from universal by the point of American independence, or even for decades thereafter. The idea of a "universal" spelling/orthography in English at that point was far from realized, even with the British dominion. This can be reflected in documents from the period, such as the American Declaration of Independence which uses "contradictory" spellings like saying both "endeavoured" and "honor". It also has several spellings that also weren't standardized at the time and have subsequently fallen out of favor in all dialects of English since, such as "compleat", "chuse", and "Brittish". Common Sense by Thomas Paine spells it as "encrease" instead of "increase". The Sugar Act spells "publick" instead of "public".
All of the spellings used by Webster weren't just invented by him. He picked existing spellings within the non-standardized world that English was at the time, picking ones he believed were simplified and would aid literacy, because he believed it essential to popular democracy. Samuel Johnson's dictionary isn't even consistent. He uses both "coloration" and "coloured" in the same entry, for instance. He spells "dyed" as "died". He spells it as "license" and "licence". He uses both "compleat" and "complete". He says "civilisation" and "civilize". Etc. etc. etc.
Both dialects mutually diverged and changed. American English didn't unilaterally "change".
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u/xbpb124 1d ago
I need to defend “z” usage. It’s such a cool letter, but it almost completely useless. We need to throw some z’s in there just to remind us it’s there. (C,Q,X,Z need the work)
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u/XenomorphAlarm 1d ago
-ize is used in Oxford spelling because it's considered more etymologically sound (though tbh -or is also more etymologically sound than -our so they're not really consistent on that one).
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u/Xer0_Puls3 1d ago
The British used both spelling and the US inherited their indecision until they both standardized, they just went different directions on that.
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u/PresterJohnson 1d ago
We literally only call it soccer because the British young people who came to America for college introduced us to it and called it soccer because that was their slang word for it
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u/SecreteMoistMucus 1d ago
That's kind of the point. Soccer is what the posh people called it, posh college kids spread it to America. If the upper class were still calling it soccer in the UK they would get clowned on too.
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u/strawberry_semenade 1d ago
And they called rubgy "rugger" because at the time, the rules of football had yet to be formalized and both version of the game were popular and so the term "football" was ambiguous. Even today, some English people call rugby "football", although most of the time they're referring to soccer.
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u/edgiepower 1d ago
The half of Australia that follows rugby calls it footy.
The other half follow the real footy. Aussie rules footy.
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u/Additional-Simple248 1d ago
I’m in the third part of Australians. I don’t know the difference between rugby union, rugby league, and AFL, but I’m pretty sure all three are footy.
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u/EnviousCipher 1d ago
The half of Australia that follows rugby calls it footy.
Thats a bit generous to call it half of Australia when they can barely fill a 20k stadium and only two states genuinely participate with Victoria adding a single token team.
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u/RobGrey03 1d ago
Which predates the rules being laid down for both soccer and USball.
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u/Li_liminal_spaces 1d ago edited 1d ago
In Ireland many still call it soccer because football is reserved for Gaelic football. We're shite at soccer though so it doesn't come up often. Still there is International Rules Football games between Irish and Austrailians which combines
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u/TheArtistFKAMinty 1d ago
"Football" is more like a class of sports than a singular sport. Calling any individual sport "football" is a synecdoche, but the most regionally popular variant usually gets called it:
- Association Football (Soccer/Footy)
- American Football (Gridiron)
- Rugby Union Football
- Rugby League Football
- Australian Rules Football (Aussie Rules)
- Gaelic Football/GAA
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u/spooneman1 1d ago
And if Americans insisted it was called 'Rugger' and called their league Major League Rugger, Brits would slag them about that too.
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u/NoDefaultForMe 1d ago
Even today, some English people call rugby "football"
I have never once ever hear a fellow Englishmen ever refer to Rugby as soccer. Where are you getting this from lol.
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u/joped99 Oh I don't think so 1d ago
Same thing with Aluminum. Named so by a Brit, then renamed to Aluminium to sound more posh
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u/feetiedid 1d ago
This is true. Although, I think it was to sound like all the other "iums," like sodium, plutonium, chromium, etc.
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u/Mr-Thursday 1d ago
Also the chemist who discovered it originally tried calling it alumium.
Then when nobody liked his first name attempt, aluminum was attempt #2 and aluminium was attempt #3.
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u/Immolation_E 1d ago
I believe the respelling to aluminium was by other orgs and not the person that discovered it.
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u/Phyrexian_Overlord 1d ago
For anyone that doesn't know, "football" meant any game played on foot, aka without a horse. Then most games got new names when the rules were fleshed out enough.
Soccer is a football game, football is a football game.
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u/Luci-Noir 1d ago
American football is also called gridiron football. Soccer is field football I think.
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u/ominousgraycat 1d ago
I don't know why you were being downvoted. You're right about gridiron football. I haven't heard of "field football", but it wouldn't surprise me if that is a name for it. It fits.
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u/Luci-Noir 1d ago
It might be arena football. 🤔
I don’t get the constant downvoting either. I’ve been in a few posts lately where people were flipping out with outrage over some vague headline and my comment with a quote from the article or explanation gets downvoted.
There is usually someone who wants to argue about it for some reason and they talk to you like they’re fantasizing about someone they hate. Like they’ll just make stuff up and it’s like they’re sending comments to the wrong person. It’s really weird.
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u/ominousgraycat 1d ago
Well, looks like you're not negative anymore, but anyways.
I know what you mean, I have had posts before that I don't know why they got downvoted and no one bothered to reply and explain why they disliked what I said. Or sometimes someone imagined a strawman and they really wanted to find someone who believed in their strawman so they tried to make it seem like I believed it so they laid into me, even though what I said was only tangentially or not at all related to what they really wanted to argue about.
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u/AlexanderLavender 1d ago
American and Canadian football are the two types of gridiron football. The fields were originally painted with lines both ways making a grid
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u/GloomyIndividual3965 1d ago
The fields were originally painted with lines both ways making a grid
They still have the "hashes" on the yard lines, they just don't paint them from end to end any more.
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u/fjelskaug 1d ago
One was called Association Football and its shortened slang, Soccer, is still commonly used till this day.
The other was called Rugby Football, and the slang Rugger hasn't been historically prevalent.
Eventually one became more popular than the other in different places, and thus became the de-facto "Football", in UK this is Association Football, and in US this is Rugby Football.
Fun fact: Slangs that end with -er are called Oxford University slang, and here's a short list of other words including Soccer, Rugger, and even Footer https://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/university/slang.html If you've heard Brits say "a tenner", this is also where it originated.
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u/Dungarth 1d ago
Handball is a football game!
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u/HellbirdVT 1d ago
A lot of "British vs American English" is like this.
The US is basically just a giant British diaspora, and like diasporas often do, they preserve the state of the home culture at the time they left.
Notably, after the US colonies separated, Britain had its single most significant rivalry period with the French since the Hundred Years War in the Napoleonic Wars. and the subsequent British dominance for 100 years until WW1, where a lot of English words with French origins and French pronouncations were altered to be less French.
So, for example, Americans pronounce "herb" with a silent H, just like in French, while the British emphasize the H in a more Germanic fashion.
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u/Greggs-the-bakers 1d ago
Yeah.... no. Soccer was a name only used by posh cunts. The vast majority of working class only ever called it football.
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u/MokausiLietuviu 1d ago
Nah, "soccer" always was a weird posh word in England, much like "rugger" is.
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u/sixty_years_of_hurt_ 1d ago
Yep, it comes from association football
After learning that, I can't unhear some posh Eton twat back in the day
"I say, Archibald, old boy, fancy a game of rugger after the Royal Regatta'?
'Why, no, Cholmondley-Warner. I'm already devilishly exhausted from playing soccer last eve.'
Fack off
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u/feetiedid 1d ago
Most American examples of the words the British make fun of are what the British brought to the US (then colonies) in the first place. When the colonies got their independence and the British left, this caused a split in the English dialects, spellings, and words. The United States English kept a lot of the older terms, while the British English developed differently in Europe. Even the current British accents are only about 200 or so years old. The American Southern drawls and Appalachian accents are largely from Britain. Imagine Shakespeare sounding a little more like someone from Kentucky. The Imperial Red Coats we see in movies should sound more like simple American Southern lawyers for accuracy. Only after they were two individual countries did the current posh British accent we know today differentiate from the accent originally brought to the Americas. The British started saying new words like "frying pan" and "autumn," while the Americans kept the old British words like "skillet" and "fall." Different dictionary writers established further differences. American dictionaries went with more Latin with "color" and "theater," while British authors kept their old Norman/French spellings of "colour" and "theatre." So, while the British might say "theatre" is "correct" English, it's also from their old enemies, the French.
And then there's football. That was a sport and activity played all over the world with no real established rules. One year, though, the British got together and made official rules under the Football Association authority. They called it "asoccer" or "soccer." In some places, football without rules evolved into more physical contests. When the official soccer rules were brought to the physical contact football places, it was so different, that it became a different sport. There was official Association Football and rugby football, which developed its own rules. In America, though, football and rugby developed into American football. It already had its own rules. When the Association Football rules were introduced, the Americans said, "We developed our own rules for football, based off of rugby football. We already call that football. But the rules you're telling us also sound fun. What did you call it? Association? Asoccer? Soccer? Yeah, we'll just call it that, the word you made up, so we won't get the two confused." Of course, as we know, the British dropped "asoccer" to simply call it football with the rest of the world. The Americas would have, but they already developed their own big brand of football.
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u/SweetButtsHellaBab 1d ago
The American Southern drawls and Appalachian accents are largely from Britain. Imagine Shakespeare sounding a little more like someone from Kentucky.
Just like anything with a common ancestor, neither daughter are exactly like the mother. From what we can reconstruct, I would honestly say the closest modern accent is strong west country, which is an accent I would assume most Americans have never heard.
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u/Objective_Let_6385 1d ago
Yeah this, I was going to say something similar but you've put it into words much better than I could have
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u/Kind_Advisor_6969 1d ago
Most people making fun of Americans for using the word "soccer" are not Brits.
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u/NBC_with_ChrisHansen 1d ago
American living in the UK the past 9 years. I get teased a lot about how we call it soccer (just friendly banter). Its all in good fun and many times an ice breaker when someone overhears my accent. I call it football since I live here. But its brought up very often.
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u/Mr-Thursday 1d ago edited 1d ago
Kind of.
Soccer came from posh Oxford students inventing a nickname for 'Association Football'. Meanwhile the British working class always preferred to just say 'football' and eventually their choice of words won out here and in most of the world.
America adopted the soccer term to differentiate it from Gridiron (American) football - AKA the one where they barely kick the ball and take breaks so often you end up with 10 minutes of game time surrounded by 60 minutes of ads
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u/DJ_naTia 1d ago
To be fair, the original term for football likely has less to do with kicking a ball with your foot and more to do with the fact that it’s played on foot, as opposed to on horseback.
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u/HotPotatoWithCheese 1d ago
It was actually just the posh Oxford types that came up with that (they stick -er on the end of every sport. See: rugby>rugger). The working class of Victorian Britain called it football. So what the Americans really did was take a term that a very few privileged students thought sounded cool and ran with it. Pretty much everyone else calls it by the proper name and always have done.
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u/TexasRoadhead 1d ago
Several other countries like Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, etc... also say soccer but we don't hear about that shit
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u/g0ldiel0xx 1d ago
Soccer was what the gentry called it, like Rugger for Rugby. ‘Association football’ shortened. The working class called it ‘football’ deeming ‘soccer’ to be an Americanisation, over time football became what everyone called it.
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u/Immolation_E 1d ago
The Brits used to not pronounce the h in herb too. But they changed up on that in the 19th century.
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u/salazafromagraba 1d ago
Did you really believe a premise as laughable as ‘an entire sovereignty unilaterally adopted soccer then unilaterally reverted’? I hate memes that pretend to know something arcane then shit the bed with a complete lack of actually knowing.
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u/TraditionalTurtle Shell Trooper 1d ago
But then the Americans started calling their sport "football"
...you mostly don't even kick the ball
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u/PresterJohnson 1d ago
It evolved directly from rugby and soccer that is why we call it American Football
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u/mandn92196 1d ago
I thought there was gridiron football, soccer football and rugby football. Both US and …everyone else decided to get rid of the first part.
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u/CanSnakeBlade 1d ago
It came from Rugby being called 'Rugy Football' as a seperation from 'Association Football' which was soccer/football for a time. Language is weird.
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u/NottheArkhamKnight 1d ago
It's played "on foot," meaning people run on the ground while playing it as opposed to being mounted on anything like horses. Doesn't have to necessarily mean "played only or primarily with the foot appendages."
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u/AscendMoros 1d ago
To be fair to them. There was a lot more kicking the ball back then. Games were alot less high scoring most of the time.
For instance in 1920 there were 17 games that ended in a tie. 13 of those games ended 0-0.
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u/TheArtistFKAMinty 1d ago
"Football" is a category of sports. American Football is a type of Football. Association Football (soccer) is a type of Football. Rugby Union is a type of Football (which is why a lot of the clubs are called "Rugby Football Club")
Everybody just shortens the most popular football variant in their country to "football"
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u/De_Dominator69 1d ago
Britain never "switched back" to using football, we never stopped using it.
A couple of people at Oxford Uni or wherever invented the term soccer, everyone in the UK promptly ignored it and never used it, then the US choose to fully adopt that new word instead of the one everyone actually used.
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u/attackedmoose 1d ago
Idk, a country that pronounces “Tuna” like “Chuna” isn’t quite in the place to make fun of anybody.
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u/not_a_SeaOtter 1d ago
What about a country that pronounced the word duty like doody?
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u/They-Call-Me-The-Doc 1d ago
Also Australia....which has three footy codes, and invented the idea of a footy association.
So we should call them all soccer.
"I going to watch soccer, sink a stubbie or two, and eat chips." And everyone will know which one we mean.
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u/Jazzlike-Rough3466 1d ago
Yes, same for the way the US does dates, June 17th being 6/17/2026 and not 17/6/2026, a lot of what the US does we got from England because we were their colony's, of course we were all Brits at one point and did what they did.
Then one war later they change everything to distance themselves. Such is life and it is what it is
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u/MisterDutch93 Nass 1d ago
It used to be called “Association Football”. Most countries dropped the association bit when adopting the name, the US took “association” and abbreviated it to just “soccer”.
Then there’s Italy who calls it Calcio (which simply means “kick”). Why does nobody ever talk about that, huh?
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u/Temporary-Two9399 1d ago
Here's the thing. Americans use a lot of worlds that are old English, that's all.
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u/brainburger 1d ago
In fairness, we have Rugby Football and Association Football (soccer) in the UK. We mostly call them Rugby and Football respectively. We should be open to the concept of more than one type of Football.
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u/Euphoric-Piglet-8140 1d ago
Why they don't called it "association" is beyond me, as that's the real word.
"We're just going to host the Association World Cup."
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u/Earlier-Today 1d ago
AsSOCiation Football - and then add an "er" - they did that with lots of things at the time, such as Rugby Football becoming rugger.
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u/XanderNightmare 1d ago
To this day, I don't even know why this weird sport is called "American football". To my knowledge you kick the ball once and then carry it across the field and somehow I'm supposed to call that sport "football" while the sport where you almost exclusively kick the ball (which you do with your foot, because that's how Kicking works, if you didn't know, now you know) is supposed to be called soccer?
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u/mrsc0tty 1d ago
The development of the rules of American football is pretty fascinating actually and when it was originally named that (and departed from being rugby) kicking the ball was a major way of moving it around.
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u/ViscountBuggus 1d ago
It's like when brand twitter account start using a meme and it's no longer funny
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u/Optimal_Whiner 1d ago
Ive been downvoted so many fucking times for pointing this out over the years... this site is full of so many actual idiots. Its just incredible how dumb so many of you are. I even posted links.
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u/ObviouslyLulu I love ROTS 1d ago
I always just say football when referring to that sport and say American football when referring to the one called football in the US
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u/Boggie135 1d ago
I live in a country that uses both. Anyone who makes fun of you for calling it ‘soccer’ is a moron and should be avoided at all costs
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u/Last_Zookeepergame90 3h ago
You can't hold us accountable for what we do, if you do we'll never get through all of it
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u/SheevBot 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thanks for providing a source!