De-coding soccer terms for this World Cup summer (copy)
My family is a soccer family. We’ve coached it, played it, and now we watch it. As you might suspect, World Cup mania has hit us hard. However, I realize not everyone shares our soccer enthusiasm. Many of you may puzzle over terms the World Cup announcers use during the games. Isn’t “nutmeg” a spice? Why and how does “hat trick” mean scoring three goals? The Word Nerd is here with some quick explanations.
First, let’s start with the name of the sport. Most people around the world call soccer “football,” which makes sense, since players primarily move a ball around with their feet. Historians can trace the basic game of soccer back to the Middle Ages. But official rules weren’t set until the late 1800s, when the sport gained popularity with aristocratic boys in England. In 1863, club leaders met in a pub to agree on official rules and form the “Football Association”. Later, the term “Association Football” got shortened to “soccer”. The theory is folks at Oxford and Cambridge liked to put “-er” on the ends of words, but Associationer didn’t sound good, so they used “soccer” instead.
The term gained favor in the U.S. in the early 1900s to distinguish it from American football. British fans embraced the name “soccer” after WWII, when the influence of American culture was high. However, in the 1980s, the Brits started to reject the American term and use “football” instead.
Next up, the place you play soccer: the pitch. For centuries, the verb “pitch” meant “to fit firmly in place”, like pitching stakes into the ground for a tent. It comes from the Middle English pichen, meaning to drive or fix firmly. Since the end of the 17th century, the process of pitching stumps into the ground to set up a game of cricket has been called “pitching the stumps”. By the late 1800s, people started using “pitch” as a noun to describe a playing area. By 1900, pitch was used specifically for a football (or soccer) playing area. In England, the term “field” usually refers to an open space, as in a pasture or grassy area, not a playing area.
Next, let’s figure out how we got from hats to three goals. The phrase “hat trick” comes from British cricket. When a player retired three batsmen with three consecutive balls, the club gave him a new hat to honor his accomplishment. Hence, “hat trick”. The term expanded to include one player scoring three goals in one match of any appropriate sport, and eventually it came to mean three major achievements in any field. It’s now sometimes used in baseball when a batter gets three hits during three turns at bat.
A brace in soccer is not quite as impressive, but still deserves celebration. The word brace, when used as a noun, comes from Middle English and Anglo-French. Brace means a clasp, pair, pair of arms, or support. It derives from the Latin bracchia, the plural of bracchium, which means arm. In soccer, if a player scores a brace, that means he or she scored two goals, or a pair, in one game. Considering soccer games usually have low scores, this is harder to accomplish than it sounds.
And finally, the most interesting term of the bunch: nutmeg. Why is a cooking spice part of the sport? The Guardian ran an interesting story, based on the book Football Talk – The Language and Folklore of the World’s Greatest Game by Peter Seddon. Seddon links the term to sneaky practices in the nutmeg trade in the 1870’s. Back then, nutmeg was such a precious commodity that traders would mix wooden replicas into sacks of nutmeg shipped to England. The term “nutmegged” came to mean being deceived and made to look foolish by a clever adversary. The Guardian also shared some other suggestions, including the fact that “meg” rhymed with cockney slang for leg. Or the notion that “nuts” (another term for nutmeg in Northern England) references the nuts (testicles) of the player tricked by the move.
Now you know! Enjoy the rest of this exciting tournament.
Julia Tomiak lives in Wythe County and posts about words and books regularly at her site, Diary of a Word Nerd. Find her at www.juliatomiak.com.
