• fartsparkles@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    It’s because soccer is more of a southern English slang for football so it was never in parlance across the country (the UK never “switched” from soccer to football).

    There are many games of football: rugby league, rugby union, association football etc.

    Association, contracted to assoc / soc.

    And around Oxford, people like to add ‘-er’ to things. Rugby = rugger. Association football = soccer. Freshman = fresher.

    There’s no denying the UK has a bias in the media and literature, especially in the past, to southerners. Thus soccer became quite common in writing and thus exported widely across the world.

    But when many of the best football teams in the UK are northern, it’s understandable that the posh southern slang for the game was never widely regarded and remains ridiculed to this day.

    • smeg@feddit.uk
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      2 days ago

      posh southern slang

      Worth putting the posh part in the first line too, definitely a very public school thing to call it soccer.

      And for any confused non-brits reading, “public” schools are private schools. We named them wrong for a joke.

      • gmtom@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        Public schools may be private schools, but they ate the poshest and ponciest private schools, even if you have the money to afford them you can’t get in without the right connections.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        “public” schools are private schools

        Despite having invented the English language, you Brits are really bad at it

      • kautau@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        lol that just sounds like capitalism in the US where “freedom to choose internet” bill is actually freedom for a private corporation to choose where they have monopolies and therefore they get to choose where they sell their internet

        • smeg@feddit.uk
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          1 day ago

          Ours used to make more sense

          A public school in England and Wales is a type of fee-charging private school originally for older boys. The schools are “public” from a historical schooling context in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession or family affiliation with governing or military service, and also not being run for the profit of a private owner.