Why Do Americans Insist On Calling The Game They Play With Their ...

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Karenne Sylvester, Stuttgart, Germany

• I assume American Football is called such to mirror Rugby Football with which it has a tenuous similarity. Soccer is an Americanism for AsSOCiation Football

  Bosh, Bolton, UK

• It's not just "Americans"; the word football (used by itself) means several different games, in several different countries. Likewise soccer, is an abbreviation of "association football", the official name of the sport, as in Fédération Internationale de Football Association (International Federation of Association Football). As for the thing about hands and feet, there are at least two theories about the origin of the word football, and one has it that the word originally meant "games played on foot", as opposed to the horseback sports favoured by the nobility in the Middle Ages.

  Grant Lee, Perth, Australia

• Some 150 years ago, there were no hard and fast rules for football, and players simply agreed (and disagreed) on their own rules. The type of football played at Rugby School - Rugby Football - was perhaps the first to be codified, but it still took years for definitive rules to be hammered out. Everyone else soon followed suit, and Association Football - soccer - began its stellar rise. In America, where rugby was king, Walter Camp started tinkering about with the aspects of rugby he found unsatisfactory and came up with American Football - simply called football in America, of course - but it wasn't until the innovation of the forward pass that it began to really diverge radically from rugby. And so it went, giving rise to the four major types of football today and their two variations, which in alphabetical order are: American, Association, Australian, Canadian, Gaelic, Rugby League, and Rugby Union. In a historical sense, then, they all merit the name "football", but unlike British English, in which "football" and "soccer" were synonymous, American English first used the "football" slot for Camp's adaptation of rugby, leaving the "soccer" slot to be filled by 'the beautiful game'.

  John Adams, Querétaro, Mexico

• Sorry to ruin the party of every one that likes to America bash, but although Soccer is derived from Association Football, it is far from an Americanisation. The game was called soccer in England as far back as the 1880s and is believed to have been coined by Charles Wreford Brown, born in Bristol and schooled at Chartehouse and Oxford. We use it less commonly now, but it is a fallacy to blame Americans for using a name we invented.

  Sam, London, England

• I agree with Sam. The World Game is still generally called soccer in Australia, to differentiate it from Football, which is Australian Rules.

  Paul Dyer, Brisbane Australia

• Furthermore, soccer used to be pronounced "so-ser", as a diminutive of "association" with its soft "c". There is a corresponding diminutive of Rugby football - "rugger".

  Paul Thompson, Perth Scotland