Let's be honest. If you really care about the World Cup, there are much better blogs to read in my sidebar. And if you throw caution to the wind and decide to read non-Cupcake Mafia approved blogs that are not in my sidebar, well, I imagine you can do better yet. Still, I feel compelled to blog about this bugger despite my overwhelming ambivalence. The thing is, it's hard to be essentially German-by-proxy and not care about this World Cup (you don't have to take my word for it). The funny thing is, I am starting to care, just a teeny bit. Oh! Trinidad and Tobago tied? Good! That's good. Oh! Serbia and Montenegro lost? Sad. That's bad. Although my sympathies are more Geo-politic and not, you know, athletic.
Here's what the World Cup is really good for: this is the perfect time for me to announce that from now on, I will not be calling that sport "soccer". Stay with me here, Americans. I've been calling soccer "football" for a long time now, it's just that in my day to day life I don't have a lot of opportunity to talk about soccer. But now, everyone has soccer on the brain, so I decided this is a good time to bust out this new rule. No more "soccer". Most of the world calls it "football." What shall we call football? Well, I've been calling it "American Football", although if you feel like being French about it, I suppose you could call it "Football American". I'm not saying we should make this switch just to jump on the bandwagon with the rest of the Western World, it's just that I've never liked the word "soccer". It has that faux-French or maybe Native American? vibe going on. And, really the word "soccer" sounds totally pansy to me. Think about it: FooTbaLL (nice hard consonants) vs. Thoccer. Dude, gay.
So I decided to try to find the actual etymological origin of the word "soccer" to see if I could be persuaded to give soccer another shot. So I went to MerriamWebster.com (it's a loyalty thing) to pick up some clues. MW had this to say, "Etymology: by shortening & alteration from association football". What? Right, because "soccer" is the natural abbreviation for "associated football". Say it with me, real fast. "Associated Football." No! Still nothing. Where is the "r" sound in "associated football"? Riddle me that. But the Wikipedia was in agreement with Merriam Webster: "a slang abbreviation of Association football, often credited to Charles Wreford-Brown". Charles Wreford-Brown, you are a boob. Seems to me like the organic shortening of "association football" is "assofo".
So that's it. Your new choices for any World Cup related discussion are "football" or "assofo". Cupcake has spoken.
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4 comments:
I've always though "assball" was a much better abbreviation than "soccer".
I love Assball.
My etymology source had this: "soccer 1889, socca, later socker (1891), soccer (1895), originally university slang, from a shortened form of Assoc., abbreviation of association in Football Association (as opposed to Rugby football); cf. rugger, but they hardly could have taken the first three letters of Assoc." From: http://www.etymonline.com
A) A further search on Charlie Brown turned this up: "Charles and his fellow students at Oxford called breakfast 'brekker' and rugby 'rugger' Association Football was often shortened to Assoc. Football and Wreford Brown is believed to have thought up the word 'soccer' from Assoc. This word has stuck with us."
B) Point A notwithstanding, "Assball" has serious merrits.
Assoc it to me baby.
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