pot, kettle, soccer, football

I just saw a Brit on BlueSky mocking “an actual respected American online news commentator” for pronouncing “Macron” to rhyme with “Ramone.” My first thought: Pronounce the word “Paris” for me. Likewise, one of the Guardian footy commentators was recently annoyed by a (supposed) American mispronunciation of Paraguay — this coming from Britain, where news readers habitually call another Latin American country Nick-uh-RAG-u-uh and football announcers refer to the Aston Villa keeper as Emi MAR-tun-EZ. It wasn’t even that long ago that the English referred to a certain French city on the English Channel as Callis.

Brits can look down their noses at Americans for many things, but when it comes to mispronouncing foreign words, they are the undefeated world champions.

But any stick to beat a MAGA dog, you know? Brits have always specialized in disdaining the USA, but the Trump era has turbocharged that disdain. And — as I commented in a post on why I stopped listening to The Rest Is History — while I have yet to find criticism of the current American political regime that I believe too extreme, the tendency to treat every element of American culture as somehow representative of MAGA and therefore contemptible is … well, it’s dim-witted.

Just as I had to stop listening to The Rest Is History, so I have had to stop consulting the Guardian’s World Cup coverage. I typically find their soccer coverage the best available, but these days virtually all their commentators feel the need to belittle everything American at every opportunity — they seem to be under some compulsion to shoehorn the belittlement in even when it’s irrelevant — and are deeply wounded by the success so far of the USMNT. Most of them are saying that our boys have just been lucky and are actually playing rather poorly — a judgment that so befuddles me that I had to check other papers to find out whether I have it wrong. Turns out that the reporter for the Telegraph saw what I saw: “Any hope the Australians had of roughing up the US early on swiftly dwindled as they found themselves routinely overwhelmed on both flanks by the pace and relentless energy of Pochettino’s thrilling, high intensity, tactically fluid side.”

There will be rejoicing in Grauniadland when the Yanks crash out, whenever that may be. But if we make it into, say, the quarterfinals, a great many London sportswriters will need grief therapy.

Back to the topic of language for a moment: having the World Cup in the USA has, inevitably, revived British hatred of the word “soccer” — which is a British word. And isn’t it also odd that the regular denunciations of stupid Americans for saying “soccer” aren’t accompanied by denunciations of the Irish for doing the same thing? (In Ireland “football” means “Gaelic football,” so, like Americans, the Irish need a different word for what’s going on now in the World Cup.) As Paul Rouse, a historian of sport at University College Dublin, has pointed out,

The word [soccer] can be found in the title of a book written by one of the iconic personalities of the sport in England – Jimmy Hill – who published Striking for Soccer in 1961.

In England, for most of the 20th century, the words “soccer” and “football” were used interchangeably. Perhaps the best example of this is the title of the former Manchester United manager Matt Busby’s autobiography in 1973, Soccer at the Top: My Life in Football.

On another level, of 75 Annuals listed in a compendium as being published for the children’s market in England between 1949 and 1995, 29 contained the word “soccer” in the title and 32 contained the word “football”.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the British use of “soccer” began to disappear. The Brits mocking Americans for using the word are ignorant across both space and time. L’Angleterre, ah, la perfide Angleterre.

Thanks to all this, it has been great fun to see all these foreign visitors being fascinated and delighted by a country they’ve been taught to despise: I could choose a hundred such stories, but here are one, two, and three. It’s been rather heartwarming to hear this refrain from so many strangers: “I feel like I’ve been lied to all my life about America.”

In conclusion, God bless America — because, Lord, while we’re not what the Guardian says we are, we desperately need Your blessing.

UPDATE 2026-07-06: I’ve continued to avoid the Guardian’s footy coverage, but this morning I decided to make an exception — I wanted to check what Barney Ronay had to say about the spectacular England-Mexico match. But the first sentence of his report was a sneer at the American accent of a public-address announcer at the Azteca. ⌘-W.