RateTheRef

Ąpropos of 'soccer': I am old enough to remember the days when 'soccer' had not yet become an Americanism and in British English was a perfectly acceptable synonym for (association) football.  The change in perception started, I think, at the end of the 1960s with the advent of the first professional association football league in the United States.  And what not everyone on this forum may be aware of is that the word 'soccer' (like many other slang terms in -er, including 'rugger') was coined at the end of the nineteenth century by the students of Oxford University.  Poor C.B. Fry will be turning in his grave over what happened to the word in the intervening decades.