When the United States soccer team takes the field against Belgium today for its biggest World Cup game yet, jersey-wearing, flag-waving, “USA!”-chanting American fans will be looking for ways to take their patriotic fervor to a new level.
Here’s one way: Talk like Americans.
As The New York Times’ Sarah Lyall and others have noted, U.S. soccer fans borrow a lot of foreign fans’ customs, from wearing team scarves (no matter how hot the weather), to nonstop singing, to the lingo of the sport.
The lingo is the most grating. U.S. fans talk about soccer in a language they’d never consider for baseball, basketball or (American) football. If they wrote the first paragraph above, “takes” would be the plural “take,” “field” would be “pitch,” “game” would be “match,” “jersey” would be “kit,” and “fans” would be “supporters.”
This is the peculiar patois in which a 0-0 score isn’t a zero-zero tie, it’s a “nil-nil draw.”
The lingo has its roots in Great Britain, whose sportswriters and broadcasters chronicle soccer’s past and present for most of the English-speaking world, impressing TV viewers and Internet readers in the United States.
But a key point seems to be lost on U.S. fans. “Pitch,” “match,” “nil” and the like aren’t soccerisms. They’re Britishisms, applicable to any British sport — and, one supposes, to any American sport if a Brit is commenting.
I rise to complain about Americans speaking like the patrons of a Liverpool pub not because I’m an American jingoist but because I’m half-British and appreciate the beauty of both English English and American English. The words we choose and the way we pronounce them are a big part of our cultural pride (and thus a big source of dinner-table debate between my Manchester-born mom and Los Angeles-born dad).
You know George Bernard Shaw’s line about England and America being two countries separated by a common language? It’s true except in soccer, where Americans seem to have surrendered.
If U.S. soccer fans want to display our national pride today, we should talk like we mean it.