It’s not an American thing. It’s a posh southern England thing that got exported to the states by American students at Oxford returning stateside and bringing the game back with them, and forgotten by the English because the southern teams pale in comparison to the north’s.
Americans don’t even know that other countries exist. So if you start telling this to an american, they will dissociate and remember something or other about The Simpsons.
A big part of why I will not give up the word soccer is because of the class implications and the association with soccer’s working class and union roots.
Soccer is a British word though, but predominantly southerner / Oxfordian.
Association Football used to get contracted to Assoc or Soc to differentiate it from Rugby Football.
And in Oxford, they historically liked to add -er to the end of things; still in parlance today is calling Rugby “rugger”, £5 note “fiver”, the Bodleian Library “Bodder”.
Assoc became “soccer”.
It’s not an American thing. It’s a posh southern England thing that got exported to the states by American students at Oxford returning stateside and bringing the game back with them, and forgotten by the English because the southern teams pale in comparison to the north’s.
Americans don’t even know that other countries exist. So if you start telling this to an american, they will dissociate and remember something or other about The Simpsons.
A big part of why I will not give up the word soccer is because of the class implications and the association with soccer’s working class and union roots.
Oxford is hardly associated with the working class.
The what now?
I have never heard the Bodleian get called ‘bodder’ before. Wow. Huge if true.