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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

Disappointed to see this is about "American Football", not "Football".

Seriously, I'm curious about the ever-stricter rules about contrasting uniforms in football outfits - enough that national sides can't play in their classical colors anymore, and club teams have four to six alternate uniform sets; I thought that was to facilitate the automated analysis of games, as I've already seen some contrast-jacked still shots used to overlay tactical diagrams.

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There is not one "football" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football

Eh, "Football" is a term that's ambiguous, and different dialects have it refering to different sports.

(Lest you think I'm a yank, I'm Irish, and there's people here who'd say "football" for a different sport (gaelic football)).

I can't see why this was downvoted. I felt exactly the same.

Complaining that it refers to the "wrong" football adds nothing to the discussion.

There was a whole other paragraph that did.

Isn't that talking about the other football?

I agree, that part of the post at least seemed on-topic. I guess it was collateral damage, maybe there's a lesson to be learned. (Note, I didn't up- or down-vote)

(There was an opening joke, and an open-ended technical question.

But 'murricans sure be touchy with anything that looks like critique of 'murrican exceptionalism, even in sports.)

As someone else pointed out, there is no one sport that has a monopoly on the term "football". Also, complaining about Americans who refer to American football as "football" often sounds like thinly veiled xenophobia disguised as pedantry, a la "here's one more thing I hate about those stupid Americans..." It's such an odd thing to complain about that it comes across as the tip of a hate iceberg rather than an actual complaint about terminology.

Can you imagine applying this to other countries? "Oh those stupid Chinese, they call their country 'Zhongguo', but it's clearly 'China.'" Seems that labeling country-specific language variations as "wrong" is acceptable only for the USA.

Alternately, it's like if someone were to write a color management API for Python, but used the British spelling for "color", and a few commenters on some tech forum got up in arms about the spelling. Equally abrasive (the commenters, that is) for similar reasons (a faint whiff of xenophobia and/or a sense of cultural entitlement).

s/British/International

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