Amid all the noise – literal and figurative – over the World Cup, Jon Stewart and others have been asking, “Why can’t we get the rest of the world to call it ‘soccer’?” The answer in the case of British people is simple: the word is a piece of upper-class English slang that can cause widespread offence.
Alan Jay Lerner’s line is as apt as it was 54 years ago: “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” Case in point: the game most of the world knows as football.
In the upper reaches of English society inhabited by the late Princess Diana and her kind it has long been popular to use whimsical abbreviations for things: underwear is referred to as “undies,” one asks not are you comfortable but are you “comfy,” champagne is “champers,” those on their way to Twickenham rugby ground will say “We’re off to Twickers.”
Despite the usage of the masses there are people in England who when they say “football” mean rugby. I attended a school in London where “football” was used partly to avoid mention of a rival school. To eliminate ambiguity, standard British English turns to the fact that soccer-football is governed by a body called the Football Association. Rugby in contrast has the Rugby Football Union. So the formal names for the two are “Rugby football” and “Association football.”
These get manipulated by the social upper crust into “rugger” and “soccer.” The average British sports fan would rather die than be heard using these terms.
The difference is complicated by the very visible class difference between the players and supporters of the two games. Professional soccer teams have long attracted huge crowds and huge sums of money, while rugby for a long time was largely amateur, played by clubs and private schools. Rugby, we are told, is a game for ruffians played by gentlemen, and soccer is a game for gentlemen played by ruffians. Curiously, this distinction applies only to England; in the nations on the periphery of the British Isles rugby earns much broader popularity.
Much ink has been spilt, nay many learned treatises written, on how the British language varies with social class. This is often dismissed as snobbery or inverted snobbery, but it is in fact a genuine divergence of discourse. If an Englishman suggests meeting for dinner, you have to know his social class in order to now whether he is thinking of the evening or the middle of the day.
I remember well the look of bafflement on the face of a school caretaker in north London when a woman visitor (who happened to be a secretary in the Prime Minister’s office) told him, “There’s no loo paper!” She repeated it several times, until recognition dawned.
“Oh, toilet paper!” he exclaimed, and headed for the supplies closet.
In the 1950s Prof. Alan Ross invented the terms “U” and “non-U” to distinguish between upper-class and non-upper-class speech. His thesis was that in modern times it is only by their speech that the British aristocracy can be distinguished from everyone else – they are neither richer nor better educated nor better dressed than the rest of society.
The attitude of upper class speakers is often assumed to be one of distaste towards coarseness, but in fact it is quite different. What bothers a U-speaker is not lack of refinement but genteelness and pretension. So, a non-U-speaker will say “perspiration;” a U-speaker will say “sweat.” “Wealthy” is non-U; “rich” is U. “Toilet” is probably the most reviled genteelism.
There are gaps in the languages. For example, what Americans call “dessert” working-class English people call “sweet.” There is no word for this in U-speech. All one can say is “What will you have now?”
While there are linguistic class differences in the US, they are far less common. Philip Roth does tell us how much it irritated him when his preppy girlfriend called vomit “barf.”
So it is amusing to think that egalitarian Americans who say “soccer” should be so influenced by the English aristocracy. While countless Americanisms have been pouring eastwards for a century and more, it is true that some Briticisms are becoming established here. Many Americans now know what a queue is, a useful unambiguous word. “Gentrification” of neighborhoods must be an import, because the word “gentry” has never been in common usage in the US.
The bottom line is I fear there is no solution to the problem of what to call the game with the round ball. But maybe it does not matter until the United States attains some prominence in world soccer. When do you suppose that will be?