A spheroid, obviously.
“And all the world is football-shaped
It’s just for me to kick in space
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste
And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five”
“Senses Working Overtime” XTC.
… ellipsoid …
Yeah, sorry guess that’s not really relevant though as Italy and Japan don’t have another football code that’s more popular. Japan is literally “sakkaa.” and now that I look, I guess it’s “sokker” in Afrikaans? Interesting.
You must admit, “football” rolls off the tongue more than “Oh my God! Run from the spiders! ball.”
In America the remorseless and unending battle versus nature is called “Survivor”.
In Australia it’s called camping.
Not quite, a football (and a buckyball) have a combination of 5 and 6 sided panels.
See here, black panels have 5 sides, white panels have 6 sides.
Very interesting responses here. I’m curious as to how many panels an Association football has–but don’t tell me! I want to see if I can remember how to figure it out by induction from a tetrahedron.
I’d forgotten all about the football reference in The Hobbit. We can but speculate about the details of dwarven football, and what the premier rivalries might have been. Lonely Mount FC and Khazad-Dûm United, maybe?
We don’t get nearly as much TV or other materials from the UK but I think most people here are reasonably familiar that there are two sets of terms for cars and a variety of other mechanical contrivances which were invented after our common language divided us.
“Bonnet” actually is a very apt term for what we call the hood, and for much the same reason. You have to imagine a very old, vintage car like this 1940 Plymouth sedan. When the hood is open and seen from the front, it actually looks like a bonnet (or hood).
Well, South Africa is probably the only country (apart from Wales) where rugby is the dominant code (at least among white South Africans and particularly Afrikaners).
Oh, god, now you’ve done it!
Here come the Kiwis! 5, 4, 3…
Easily overlooked…
NB: Fainites, I’ve got my specs on!
American football is called that due to tradition. Originally it was just a modification of rugby.
As for the kickers falling, surely you’ve heard of a dive? Same thing. OK, not always. Sometimes it’s just that they’re trying to get as much altitude to the ball as they can, which kickers in other sports don’t try to do.
Last I heard, the bucky-ball football has been replaced with a football sewn something like a baseball. The problem, of course, is to get something roughly spheroid (one of the differences on which “rugby” and “the football association” split), and the association rules have a definition of how spheroid it has to be.
Back when Buckminster Fuller was getting all the publicity for the geodesic dome, the sports company which had paid for the right to supply footballs for the FIFA World Cup decided to make a new “modern” football using a “new modern” sewing pattern. Now that geodesic domes aren’t new and modern any more, they’ve decided to go on to another sewing pattern. (In fashion, change is good.).
To me (vic.aus), “football shaped” is ovoid unless I’m watching the BBC or the ABC. The Australian Broadcast Commission has the rights to Association Football here, and apparently (??) ( I’ve heard that) as part of the contract, they are required to use the unqualified term “football” only and always for Association Football.
Yes, but futbol, futebol, etc, all refer to the game, not to the thing that gets kicked. So those languages would have no concept of futbol-shaped, etc.
It means* truncated icosahedron* in South Africa. American “football-shaped” would be “rugby-ball shaped” here.
IME, it’s as likely to be ‘voetbal’ as ‘sokker’ to die man op die straat.
But it’s definitely “soccer” to South African Bantu-speaking Blacks
Fair enough. I was more struck with the number of specialist kickers recruited from other football codes internationally.
I stand by my comment that Stewie Griffin’s head will be identified as football shaped while Eric Cartman’s will not.
This might be a bit of an oversimplification. Rugby football and Association football both evolved out of attempts to codify, for the purpose of university games, compromise rules that reflected the footballing traditions that prevailed in different English schools. The idea was that when men moved from school to university, they needed to establish common rules for playing football.
One influential early attempt was the Cambridge rules, which allowed handling of the ball if a player caught it from a kick by the opposing side (“marking”) A player who marked a ball could either kick it from where he stood, or run with it and pass it by hand. These eventually evolved into the rules of Association football, and marking/running was dropped, but that didn’t happen until American football had also evolved out of the same original rules. Strictly speaking, American football started from the (then) rules of Association football, which permitted ball-handling in certain circumstances, but its subsequent evolution was influenced by Rugby football, while Association football evolved in the opposite direction, eventually banning all forms of ball-handling, except by the goalkeeper.
New Zealand, Oceania and, if you combine League and Union, rugby even edges Aussie Rules in Oz.
Wikipedia sez Aussie Rules = 7,150,586 spectators in 2016, vs. 4,361,310 for league+union. Of course you may be correct using a different metric for measuring dominance, such as $ earned.
No, but we do have the notion that a pelota or balón is different if it’s used for fútbol, balóncesto, balónmano, pelota mano… they’ve got different sizes, panels, hardnesses and even colors. We just call them names which the literally minded would translate as “ball of [sport]”. And we can say “make a ball the size of a pelota mano ball” or “the balón was reglamentary size but not reglamentary otherwise”.