Words are not born, they are made. In general, we do not know when and where: they come from the mists and jokes of history. But a few are invented by someone. A Mr. Borges has already said that he could not imagine anything more satisfying than adding a word to the language – and he regrets not having done so. His modesty was as false as ever: the word he added to the language was Borgiano.
In every invented word there is a story, a hope: someone who shapes it until one day they consider it ripe enough to throw it into the cruelty of the world, hoping to get mouths and more mouths, lines and more to fill. lines. Some succeed, but many do not: they disappear. That was the history of the word football.
First, of course, there was football. Etymologists, historians and other plasticists say that in reality football was an English and medieval game in which the participants carried the ball with their hands, but did so barefoot, that is, on foot. (Needless to say, Adidas, Puma, Nike and Co. represent this bestial, slightly communist version.)
In any case, in the mid-19th century, after a multitude of brawls and quarrels, football began to resemble what we know. And around 1880 it began to spread around the world and the word became global: it began to change into “Football”, “Futebol”, “Fotbal”, “Soccer”, “Voetbal”, “Futbolas” and “Fulbo”. transform. It now seems logical that one English word should be used in so many languages; Not much happened back then.
So football was a kind of pioneer. Perhaps her pioneering role in the linguistic Anglicization of the world was not sufficiently recognized: the others followed her. But unredeemed Spain, Saint James on his radiant four-legged friend, defended itself. And his champion was a Lord Mariano de Cavia, son of a Carlist, a Jesuit student. The man was born in Zaragoza in 1855; There he started working as a journalist, but when his girlfriend's father told him at the age of 25 that he wasn't capable of doing that, he packed his two suitcases and came to Madrid. Here he spent the rest of his life in a hotel, writing mainly for a newspaper called – just in case – El Imparcial. In it, on August 1, 1908, he published a column entitled “El balompié,” in which he announced that he had invented the word.
“Several friendly young people intend to form a new football society; “They want to give it a Spanish name and because they can't get it right, they do me the favor of appealing to my short-sightedness because they consider the English word that is used to describe this sport to be untranslatable,” begins Cavia. And he says that “not only is the term football not untranslatable, but when translated literally – since the foot plays such a large role in this game – we find a Spanish word with the clearest and most traditional meaning.” Structure” , he says, suggesting “balompié,” which seems much more Castilian than “piebalón” for several reasons.
Days later, Don Jacinto Benavente – whom they soon tried to silence with a Nobel Prize – wrote another column in the same newspaper confirming the word; Football came into use and then gradually fell into disuse: it was a bit rough, almost loud. So the rest of the language talked about football and winning games and tournaments; Spain did not do this and offered bitter and bloody resistance. On May 17, 1940, as the regime – Franco – continued to kill and destroy, it became alarmed: “There were deficiencies in language that allowed the presence in public life (…) of fashions that gave the appearance of vassalism or colonial subordination.” It is the duty of the public power to suppress these customs as much as possible, since they contribute to clouding the Spanish conscience, distracting it from the purely national line and introducing exotic elements into the customs of our people, which is necessarily the case must be eliminated. In its force, this Ministry provides: Art. 1°. It is forbidden (…) the use of foreign generic words…”
Not even the powers of heaven have succeeded in making soccer replace football; Yes, football would disappear once and for all. And football has become one of the most used words in the language. It refers to the activity that most people devote more time to, the time they don't need to spend figuring out how to eat and dress and messing up their lives. One fact is clear: nothing in human history has brought more people together doing the same thing at the same time than the 1.5 billion who watched the last World Final – and no one watched football. The birth of a word is a moment of extraordinary light; his death, a long stuttering agony.
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