From: wgarcia@upf.es (Walter Garcia-Fontes)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.soccer
Subject: Re: Origin of the word 'Soccer' (was Re: UK fans...)
Date: 26 Jan 1993 14:11:07 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

In article <1993Jan26.130828.21099@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> you write:
>In article <1993Jan26.113307.14964@meiko.com> paull@plasma.co.uk writes:
>>In article 28530@newsgate.sps.mot.com, altizer@figaro (Robert
>>Altizer) writes:
>>>In article 1416@dsbc.icl.co.uk, Dave Parry <dvp@dsbc.icl.co.uk> () writes:
>>>>Football (not soccer!!!) is a game of passion and it incites passion
>>>               ^^^^^^
>>>Oh come on Dave, you Brits coined the term "soccer" (nee Association 
>>>Football) in the 19th century to distinguish the game from the equally
>>>popular Rugby League Football.
>>> [stuff deleted]
>>
>>BOLLOCKS!
>>
>>The British **HATE** the term SOCCCER! IT is football!
>>
>>This rubbish about the British inventing the name to save
>>confusion is pure crap.
>>
>> [stuff deleted]
>>
>>Without doubt the term "Soccer" comes from the USA, who
>>needed it because they had invented "American Football",
>>which they just had to call "Football" even though feet
>>hardly come in to it.
>
>Well, it's been a while since Garry Archer posted his article on
>the origins of the word 'Soccer', so Garry, perhaps you should
>re-post this article.
>

Yeah, I loved to see that article again too.  I was also convinced like
Dave that soccer was imposed on us by the American sports but it
turned out that I was wrong, and that it was quite in use in the UK
too. It was responding to me that Garry coined that article... I
decided after that discussion that I would continue using the world
football but wouldn't mind mixing it with soccer. 

>These questions/discussions have a way of popping up periodically,
>don't they? ;-)

You're right. Some of you may remember that I conducted a vote on this
newsgroup during the World Cup in Italy (taking advantage of the huge
increase in traffic that it experienced those days) to see if we would
like to change the name of the group to something else. It turned out
that it was not clear that the majority at that time would like to
change the name. It would have changed to something like
rec.sport.football.association, and ask the rec.sport.football to
change to rec.sport.football.gridiron, I think rec.sport.football has
already split into a couple of different groups since.

>
>For the record, I'm against the split-up of r.s.s, even if, over
>the years, the signal to noise ratio in this group has decreased
>steadily. I still find this group to be one of the best ways to get
>soccer information and discussions from around the world. With a
>good news reader, one can easily sift through the articles.
>

I agree absolutely. I have a very slow access to the net now, and live
in a country with good info on the sport anyway, but I can't tell
how much I learned about the feelings of fans all around the world
reading this group. 

Anyway, my two pesetas,

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----     
Walter Garcia-Fontes     | Bitnet or Internet: wgarcia@upf.es         | "Tuya,
Universitat Pompeu Fabra | UUCP: ( internet gateways )!upf.es!wgarcia | Hector"
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