4 ms·
Can we add the word "(American)" before the word football please?
by gadders 4y ago
Can we add the word "(American)" before the word football please?
- marcosdumay 4y agoOh, thanks. I got here wondering why a ball would tumble.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jimbob45 4y ago"Gridiron" is more universally recognized IMHO.
- Bakary 4y agoIsn't "Handegg" the official term?
- cortesoft 4y agoFootball games aren’t called football because you kick the ball with your foot, but because they are played on foot rather than on horseback.
- acjohnson55 4y agoThey're not exactly the same thing. Gridiron football is a whole category of football games, including the substantially similar US amateur and pro games, Canadian football, Arena football, etc. But all use the same type of ball and have forward passing, and so I agree that gridiron football probably is the more accurate term for this article. On the other hand, I don't feel like it's often used in real conversation.
- pessimizer 4y agoIt's not recognized in the US at all. The only time the phrase "gridiron football" is used ever in the world is during conversations like this. There's something ironic in rewriting the names of a US sport in a title to make it understandable, but in a way that is unintelligible to people from the US.
- jbluepolarbear 4y agoAmericans don’t call it American Football though and this is an American centric article.
- gigglesupstairs 4y agoBut this is not an only America centric website and hence the OP’s request. Never harms to have an accurate title when international audience is involved.
- pandemicsyn 4y ago> Never harms to have an accurate title when international audience is involved. But this does not _only_ apply to "American" Football balls but also to Canadian Football balls... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_Canadian_football#The_ball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_Can...
- jbluepolarbear 4y agoBut it would only be accurate for non-Americans. That’d be like asking a UK article to use soccer instead of football because other international audiences don’t call it football. There isn’t an accurate title when different populations use different vocabulary for the same thing.
- StevePerkins 4y agoComplain when titles are changed. Complain when titles are printed verbatim as-is. Complain when an article from Vox (an explicitly American website) is written from an American perspective. Say what you want, but I can't imagine an American being lame enough to request that a football article from "theguardian.com" be renamed to specify "soccer".
- googlryas 4y agoLook on the bright side - we've moved beyond the "I think you mean handegg" meme when people complain about American football vs rest-of-the-world football. And, to be fair, I am an American and am certainly lame enough to complain when I see something Britishly done that I don't like. For example, when a BBC article is posted about UNICEF, their capitalization rules have them bizarrely spell it "Unicef".
- JadeNB 4y ago> Look on the bright side - we've moved beyond the "I think you mean handegg" meme when people complain about American football vs rest-of-the-world football. Sure? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194609
- User23 4y agoEspecially since "soccer" is actually English and not American slang. I'm not clear on the details on account of English slang delights in its incomprehensibility to outsiders, but apparently it's short for "association (football)."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gumby 4y agoI struggled with this when submitting it (particularly as I played AFL -- poorly -- as a kid). But decided it would look too strange as people don't say "American Football" in the US, any more than they say "rugby football" elsewhere. I did not use the verbatim headline from the article because it was clickbait that was even less informative than what I wrote. So I was already doing some editorializing. I should have added the word "Physics" though.
- gadders 4y agoI did say put it in brackets. Maybe square brackets would make it clearer it's an addition.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- mhb 4y agoIf this is what troubles you, the proliferation of the ambiguous pronoun must be hell.
- jeltz 4y agoIt made the headline harder to understand than necessary. I was confused at first.