Right back Denzel Dumfries gave a stunning performance as the Netherlands became the first team to qualify for the quarterfinals of the World Cup with a 3-1 win over the USA on Saturday.
荷兰队球员丹泽尔·邓弗里斯(上)在比赛中破门得分。新华社记者 贾浩成 摄
相比于赛场上的精彩进球,荷兰首相马特·吕特的线上“整活儿”同样有趣。
“football赢了”
据政客欧洲网站报道,在荷兰队赢得比赛后,吕特在推特上转发了美国总统乔·拜登的一条推文,并写道:
“对不起,乔(拜登),football赢了。”
“Sorry Joe, football won.”
That was Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s jocular shot at U.S. President Joe Biden on Saturday night, after the Netherlands dumped America out of the World Cup in Qatar.
*jocular:打趣的;逗乐的(funny or intended to make someone laugh)
吕特开玩笑转发的内容,是拜登在赛前录制的一条给美国队加油的视频。
Rutte was pulling Biden’s leg after the U.S. leader filmed a pre-match clip on Twitter.
*pull someone's leg:开玩笑,试图说服某人相信某事不是真的(to try to persuade someone to believe something that is not true, as a joke)
In a video posted on Twitter before the game, USA star Tyler Adams is seen doing keepie uppies.“Hey Mr President, heads up!” the Leeds man says from a stadium in Doha, before ‘kicking’ the ball to Biden, who appears with a ball between his hands in the White House gardens.
镜头一转,双手接球的拜登出现了,他随即说道:“这叫soccer!”并给美国队加油助威。
“It’s called soccer!” Biden says to the camera with the ball between he hands.“Go USA. You guys can do it.”
政客欧洲网站称,对拜登而言,美国队被淘汰出局,也让“soccer”在世界杯上露脸的机会微乎其微。
Unfortunately for Biden, at this point “soccer” has a snowball’s chance in Qatar of catching on around the world.
Whether to call it “football” or “soccer” has stoked transatlantic divisions for decades — even though the word soccer actually originated in 19th-century England.
The word "soccer" is a British invention that British people stopped using only around 40 years ago, according to a 2014 paper by University of Michigan professor Stefan Szymanski.
In the early 1800s, a bunch of British universities took "football" — a medieval game — and started playing their own versions of it, all under different rules. In the early 1800s in England, football and rugby existed as different variations of the same game. One variant of the game you played with your hands became "rugby football."
1863年,为了统一football运动的规则,名为足球协会(Football Association)的组织成立了,足球运动也被称为“协会足球(association football)”。到了1871年,另一个名为橄榄球足球联盟(Rugby Football Union)的组织也成立了。这两项运动正式命名为英式橄榄球(Rugby Football)和英式足球(Association Football)。
But in 1863, the Football Association was formed to codify the rules of football so that aristocratic boys from different schools could play against one another. In 1871, the Rugby Football Union followed suit. The two sports officially became known as Rugby Football and Association Football.
"Rugby football" became "rugger" for short, then "rugby". "Association football" became "soccer." "Soccer" is a corruption of the shortened form of Association, "assoc.". To support this argument, he cites a letter to The New York Times, published in 1905: “It was a fad at Oxford and Cambridge to use “er” at the end of many words, such as foot-er, sport-er, and as Association did not take an “er” easily, it was, and is, sometimes spoken of as Soccer.”
After these two sports spread across the Atlantic, Americans invented their own variant of the game that they simply called "football" in the early 1900s.
And the term soccer, Szymanski says, was widely recognized in England through the first half of the twentieth century, according to data he crunched from books and newspapers. It became even more prevalent after the World War II — driven, he suggests, by the number of American soldiers in the country and the infatuation with American culture that came after the war.
But by the 1980s, Brits started to turn against the word. “The penetration of the game into American culture,” Szymanski writes, “has led to backlash against the use of the word in Britain, where it was once considered an innocuous alternative to the word ‘football.'”
世界杯的比赛临近尾声,但是显然对于足球运动英文名字的争论,远不会停歇。
The World Cup draws to a close, but the argument over the name of the sport it celebrates certainly won’t.
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