For people raised in the US, as a kid did you ever wonder why a game in which, most of the time, nobody kicks the ball with their foot (people mainly just pass the ball with their hands or hold the ball with their hands and run, and only during rare moments does someone actually get to use their foot on the ball), why such a game would be called ‘football’?
I checked out Wikipedia and it does have a reasonable explanation for the name of the game, but I’m wondering if you ever personally felt like ‘WTF?’ about the name.
Not once. I think that’s because we grew up with baseball, basketball, and football. In one there were bases, in one there were baskets, in one there was kicking involved. Made/makes perfect sense. The only thing that does not make sense is why one would rather play soccer than any of those. Well, over football or basketball anyway. I can see that baseball can be b-o-r-i-n-g.
Did you not consider that in soccer people use their feet most of the time to advance the ball, to pass, and to score, while in American football contact between a ball and a foot happens very rarely?
Do you agree that bases play a much more important/prominent role in baseball, and baskets play a much more important/prominent role in basketball, than kicking plays in football?
This of course leads to “Why is the ball that is called a ‘football’ called that, since it rarely comes into contact with a foot, and is most often held in someone’s hands?”
I guess, if you’re a kid, and you see everyone calling something a ‘football’, you don’t question it and it is simply a football to you.
I thought that maybe some kids, especially of the SDMB variety, would be a bit more curious and question some basic things that they are taught.
I thought it more than once, but it was explained to me that handball was an entirely different game. I don’t get where the name soccer came from (I haven’t looked it up, either).
According to Wikipedia: "The term soccer originated in England, first appearing in the 1880s as an Oxford “-er” abbreviation of the word “association” "
As a kid I read the history of US Football so I know way back there was much more kicking. For a long while a FG was worth more points than a TD. And the forward pass did not really become popular until the 20’s and 30s with the Rockne era at Notre Dame.
Yes, I noticed things like that in high school, including the fact that the ball used in American football doesn’t often get kicked by a foot. And in basketball the so-called basket doesn’t look remotely like a bushel basket. And in the classes in my high school the names didn’t make much sense either. Physics wasn’t very physical. Homeroom wasn’t in my home. The students in social studies didn’t act very social. So I decided that names were arbitrary.
In the early days of Basketball they had a jump ball after every made basket, like hockey has face off after a goal. Obviously that made the game much slower.
Volleyball’s named after the volley? Tennis is named after the tennis ball? (Etc). You sure about that?
You call it a football because of the game that you call football, not the other way round. Sorry, dude.
The football, baseball, basketball analogy doesn’t stand up either: baseball and basketball are named after the equipment that you use to score a point, not the body part.
But I can understand everyone just knowing it was called ‘football,’ shrugging and not worrying about it, because even little kids notice that the English language is not always logical.
Football (kind of like rugby, really)
Hockey (National Canadian Winter Sport)
Basketball (Invented by a Canadian)
Baseball (Played in Canada a year before Abner Doubleday “invented” it)
I don’t know much about the history of the sport, but the Canadian edition of football is based on a three-down system, and it is my impression that as a result kicks, punts and field goals play a much larger role in the strategy (onside-kick!) and outcome of the game than they do in the NFL. So calling it “football” isn’t that absurd, even now.
