In America, where I happen to live, football refers to a generally over-praised sport in which two teams of large individuals in foam and spandex run at and smash each other with the intention of getting a squashed-looking ball into an area at the end of a 100 yard patch of grass and preventing the other team from getting it to their end. Though the timer only times one hour, the game stops so much that it takes roughly four hours to play. In pretty much every other country, football refers to a game in which two teams of people in shorts kick a ball back and forth with the intention of getting it to go into a frame with a net attached and to prevent the other team from getting the ball into the other net. There is usually an awful lot of bad acting involved and the patch of grass is so big and the ability of the players to accomplish their objective so limited, the majority of the game is spent sending the ball back and forth without scoring. Americans refer to this same exercise as soccer.
A lot of other countries claim that Americans do not play true football (as the other countries' football is the one actually played with feet) and that the game Americans refer to as football is in every way inferior to rugby, which is basically a rougher version of American football where they wear less padding, supposedly stop less, can't pass the ball forward, and occasionally do a cheerleader formation (in order to block the ball, or something). I say it supposedly stops less because in the rugby I have watched, there is still a considerable amount of time spent setting up and standing around. Americans in turn tend to tell the other countries that they are being silly and should use soccer for the sport played with feet because it is less confusing given American football doesn't have another name by which to call it.
As you might have deduced, I don't have much fondness for any of the sports that are called football. Still, I have to at least partially side with my fellow countrymen. Soccer, as it turns out, is actually a British term used originally as a colloquial name for association football in order to give it a shorter name, but still distinguish it from rugby football, which is the rugby game described above. More on this can be read about here. What I find important about this information is that now the count of sports that are or have been referred to as football is up to three: rugby, soccer, and American football.
My husband loves a game called handball, but this is not the Olympic sport where teams of people hit a ball back and forth at each other with their hands. No, this is handball where you play it like racquetball, except that you replace all rackets with hands. I bring this up because it is another instance of the point I am going to make: naming a game after a body part and following it up with the name of the object that a large number of sports use in some form is a terribly unspecific way to name a game. It gets confusing because any number of sports could be described that way. It is like calling desserts "baked sugar" or "whipped sugar;" I really have no more of an idea of what the dessert is and I can't be sure you don't mean some other dish in which sugar is baked or whipped.
To me, names should distinguish and football really fails to do that; soccer is really only used to refer to one game, thus I consider it preferable. The thing I disagree with other Americans on is that once the net game in shorts is referred to as soccer, football should then be used to refer to the sport with the foam and spandex described above. As I have discussed, it is a really useless name. Thus, I think it would be much better to come up with a new name entirely. So far, my husband and I have come up with merrer (derived from American like soccer is derived from association), but we are not sure that is the best name. Any other suggestions?
