Surely, you can’t be serious?! :dubious:
Hey, where are you going if an elephant sits on your car?
Would ya believe they were producing a stage production of the Rocky Horror Show?
I heard it was played with the severed heads of enemies, but I suppose that detail matters relatively little. 
/me does the gag.
To phone the local paper and get some pictures, in the hope this will pay for the new car…
Easily.
Yeah, but they go soggy after the first hour or two, which is a real downer when you’ve a whole Shrove Tuesday afternoon to kill, take it from me… oops.
As calm kiwi mentions, there are parts of the world where “football” means one of the varieties of Rugby. These include New Zealand, New South Wales north of the Murrumbidgee, and possibly South Africa.
(I come from New South Wales, where the default “football” is Rugby League, but where soccer, Rugby Union and Australian Rules are also played. And people watch American football on TV. I doubt if anywhere in the world has more kinds of football.)
I’ve been cruising the World Cup message boards on the BBC, and was really shocked about how much everyone hates America these days.
So no, it’s not arrogant. It’s one more case of an American wanting to fit in.
Since Malacandra declined;
Yes, of course he’s serious. and don’t call him Shirley!
Sorry, missed that :smack:
Rugby is played at “Bath Football Club”, in England, for that matter.
Except in Canada where they play Canadian football.
A’s have won 10 in a row, Jered Weaver went 4-0 and got sent down, the Braves’ 14 year streak is over. Americans are too disinterested in soccer to be arrogant about it. It’s tiring to tell the euros every 4 years that Americans don’t care.
American football used to look very much like rugby football. The innovation of sometimes actually throwing and catching the ball, now a pretty dominant characteristic of the game, didn’t occur until the 1910’s. But the name of the game was well entrenched by then, even though the use of the feet was no longer significant.
I thought Aussies called the American game “gridiron”? That name is obsolete too, btw - fields have been striped in only one direction, not both, for about as long a time.
Why doesn’t anyone think the English are arrogant, because everyone says “football,” their word for the game? After all, the Spanish “futbol” is just a transliteration; there is not “fut” and no “bol” in Spanish–it would be “bola del pie” or something.
American football is still often known as gridiron here. And the film “Airplane” is called “Flying High”.
Regarding the notion that the name “football” has anything in particular to do with the kick-based nature of the game, a repost of what I said a couple of years ago in this thread:
My source for all of this is The Simplest Game, by Paul Gardner. It’s a book about (what’s known in the US as) soccer, but there’s some interesting info in there about the origin of the sport and the “football” name. Page numbers for my citations are from the 3rd edition.
Specifically, this tidbit from the first paragraph of Chapter 1 (p.1):
The 1300’s version of “football” bore scant resemblance to either modern game. The ball was carried, kicked, thrown, or whatever in what sounds like the ultimate in “barbarian ball”. Gardner writes (p.1), “The most notable feature of the contests was an absence of rules.”
Apparently, the game developed over the next 500 or so years as a very popular but hideously dangerous and often outlawed activity. Football was played by students at various schools in England, normally against the wishes of the administration, and while every school had its own particular version, two distinct “codes” of play evolved. One allowed players to run while holding the ball, while the other permitted use of the hands to stop a ball, but required that it be advanced only with the feet. Both were known as “football.”
A guy by the name of Thomas Arnold was the headmaster at the Rugby School from 1828-1842. Rather than following the examples of his predecessors by trying to squash this game, he laid down some rules at Rugby and encouraged play of “football.” The version of football being played at Rugby was the “handling” one, and a number of other local schools adopted this style as they gained control over the sport on their own campuses.
Still, every school pretty much had its own set of rules. In 1848 Cambridge University tried to publish a unified set of rules. According to Gardner, these rules have not survived. There is, though, a somewhat abbreviated version published in 1862 by J.C. Thring. Of his ten(!) rules, one was that hands could only be used to stop the ball. Clearly Cambridge favored the “dribbling” version of football.
You’d think that this “handling” vs. “dribbling” distinction would be what ultimately sent the two divisions of football off down their own evolutionary paths, but Gardner claims that this is not the case. Instead, it was another of Thring’s rules - one stating that players’ kicks could only be directed at the ball, and not at other players.
Kicking opponents’ legs, or “hacking”, was at that time considered an integral part of the “handling” version of football. Proponents of this game did not take kindly to its being outlawed. In 1863 Cambridge put together another set of “universal” rules for football, which again proscribed both hacking and carrying the ball. The grumbling grew louder in some circles.
Later that year a climax was reached: leading football clubs (non-school groups, which had been growing in popularity) from the London area got together to organize the Football Association, the goal being country-wide regulation. In trying to lay down the official rules, though, they were forced to acknowledge that there were, in fact, two games laboring under the common name “football.” Gardner writes (p. 7):
The “dribbling game” became known as “association football”, being played according to the F.A. rules. The “handling game” became known as “rugby football” (evidently after Rugby, where its first rules were codified some time before), and organized itself under the Rugby Union in 1871.
Popular student slang of the day often dropped the end of a word and replaced it with “er” or “ers”; the name “soccer” apparently came about in this manner based on the abbreviation of association - “assoc.”
Gardner doesn’t go into much detail on the evolution of rugby football into what we now call American football. (It is, after all, a soccer book.) I believe it was somewhat straightforward, though(?) Possibly not…
Anyway, the conclusion I draw is that “football” isn’t just a term that some dudes here in the states decided (for no reason) to slap onto a game that evolved from rugby. Rather, it’s a reasonable thing to call a spinoff from rugby football, which is the full name of its parent sport.
Does anyone get all upset when the Italians refer to it as “calcio”?
The best thing about calling it “soccer” is that it pisses off people like “Commenter 1” & “Commenter 2”. They sound like a couple of wankers.
Which is identical to American football except for a couple of differences in the rules. I don’t know of anybody who calls it “Canadian football”.
Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Where does foosball fit in?
That’s an anglicisation of the German “Fußball” - which, of course, means “football”.
I do, when I talk about it with my American friends and family.
Interestingly, I find here in the Canadian west, that the term “football” refers to the Canadian game, while “NFL” is used to refer to the American version of the game.
Some info I dug up for another thread:
Social, economic, ethnic, and demographic influences on the growth of American Soccer