[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=world+cup+england+us&iid=9097887″ src=”http://view1.picapp.com/pictures.photo/image/9097887/south-africa-rustenberg/south-africa-rustenberg.jpg?size=500&imageId=9097887″ width=”234″ height=”167″ /]The soccer (US)/football (UK) World Cup may be a great sporting event (I stress may …), but it is an even greater opportunity for linguists, especially since England played the U.S. yesterday. Quite apart from the fact that the two teams have different names for the game itself and almost everything to do with it (field vs pitch, match vs game, and I believe the vocabulary for the players’ positions varies, too), I found two charming language notes to share.
My local paper carried this headline on the sports page today:
I presume the reporter expected England to win (yes, well …), so for the American team to force a draw (or tie in American English?) is a success for them. Interestingly, this suggests that win is not necessarily in a binary relationship with lose (or even a mutually exclusive relationship with lose and draw/tie). That is, winning is not the same as not losing or not tying. [Compare lend/borrow as a true pair of binary verbs.] This reminds me of the (American) football game last year when the Eagles’ quarterback, Donovan McNabb, claimed that he “never knew” that a tie was possible in a regular season game, making the result seem like another loss to the long-suffering fans of Philadelphia like myself.
[picapp align=”right” wrap=”true” link=”term=soccer+red+card&iid=9105348″ src=”http://view.picapp.com/pictures.photo/image/9105348/referee-marco-rodriguez/referee-marco-rodriguez.jpg?size=500&imageId=9105348″ width=”127″ height=”185″ /]But back to the football that is mostly played with the foot. Using bad language (i.e. swearing/cursing) is punished quite strictly during the World Cup, but only if the referee hears and understands it. Since referees have to be from neutral countries, no English or American refs could officiate Saturday’s game. An amusing piece from AP noted that:
referees can’t give out cards [i.e. warnings and expulsions] for what they think was said, and FIFA requires World Cup referees and assistants to be proficient only in English.
Which means that you might get away with swearing as long as you avoid English and the ref’s first language! I presume the English team was studying useful expressions in Chinese before the game …
Nigel Caplan 
