spam

November 29, 2021

29 November 2021

The brand name Spam, used for canned meat product made by the Hormel Corporation, is probably a blend of spiced + ham. It went on the market in 1937, as can be seen in this notice published by the US Patent Office:

Ser. No. 394,133. GEO. A. HORMEL & COMPANY, Austin, Minn. Filed June 16, 1937
SPAM
For Canned Meats—Namely, Spiced Ham.
Claims use since May 11, 1937.

And in this advertisement in the Minneapolis Tribune of 25 June 1937:

SPAM
Hormel Spiced Luncheon Meat.
Cooked Ready to Serve, 12 oz. tin.
EA. 29c

And Hormel’s annual report for 1937 concludes with the following plug for its newest product:

An interesting new product of Geo. A. Hormel & Co. is SPAM. Stockholders are urged to ask for SPAM. They are urged to have a breakfast of SPAM and eggs, or a SPAMWICH at noon lunch, or Baked SPAM for supper. One of a long line of Hormel innovations. It is copyrighted. Only Hormel can produce SPAM. It is packed in 12 oz. cans.

The explanation of spiced + ham is a bit contentious though. While the evidence from the quotations given above point to it being correct, some contend that since the primary ingredient isn’t ham, but rather pork shoulder, that blend isn’t the real origin. But then, such distinctions have never gotten in the way of marketing, so the spiced + ham origin remains the most likely explanation. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink In America cites “company sources” as giving an alternative, acronymic explanation of Shoulder of Pork And Ham, but this sounds like a post-hoc rationalization of the term.

But spam is more than just a meat product. It’s slang for mass posting or sending of internet messages and email, especially commercial advertisements, without regard to their appropriateness for the specific forum or venue. This sense of spam was created in homage to a Monty Python sketch about a café that serves nothing but Spam and patronized by a group of Vikings who interrupt conversations with paeans to Spam that largely consist of the product’s name repeated again and again. The sketch first aired on the BBC on 15 December 1970:

Cut to a café. All the customers are Vikings. Mr and Mrs Bun enter—downwards (on wires).
Mr Bun (ERIC) Morning.
Waitress (TERRY J) Morning.
Mr Bun What have you got then?
Waitress Well there’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top and spam.
Mrs Bun (GRAHAM) Have you got anything without spam in it?
Waitress Well, there’s spam, egg, sausage, and spam. That’s not got much spam in it.
Mrs Bun I don’t want any spam.
Mr Bun Why can’t she have egg, bacon, spam and sausage?
Mrs Bun That’s got spam in it!
Mr Bun Not as much as spam, egg, sausage and spam.
Mrs Bun Look, could I have egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam.
Waitress Uuuuuuggggh!
Mrs Bun What do you mean uuugggh! I don’t like spam.
Vikings (singing) Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam...spam, spam, spam, spam...lovely spam, wonderful spam...

But like many slang terms, spam did not have a fixed definition at first. It went through several similar senses before settling on the one that is familiar today. The first known computing use of the term is as a verb. From Eric Raymond’s Jargon File of 16 August 1991:

spam: [from the {MUD} community] vt. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data.

And there is this definition that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 30 September 1993:

Spam: Information that might not be legitimate or real, as in "This rumor may have a high Spam content."

And this from Newsday on 7 November 1993:

Spam: Pointless description, excess verbiage. "I got sick of hanging out in the Living Room, Land O' The Spam."

But the event that elevated the sense of unsolicited messages to the fore came in April 1994, when two Arizona lawyers sent an advertisement to thousands of Usenet newsgroups and subsequently attempted to establish an internet advertising agency. From the New York Times of 7 May 1994:

Mr. Canter and Ms. Siegel have been the focus of intense criticism on several computer networks since April 12, when they posted an advertisement offering their legal services on thousands of Usenet bulletin boards, called news groups, without regard for the interests of the specific news groups.
[...]
The act, while not illegal, violated long-held traditions against random placement of any type of messages on news groups. Such scatter-shot messaging is known as “spamming.”

Some say the internet went downhill from that point on.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Chapman, Graham, et al. “Spam.” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Second Series, Episode 12, recorded 25 June 1970, aired 15 December 1970. Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words, vol. 2 of 2. New York: Pantheon, 1989, 27.

Doll, Pancho. “A Quiet Revolution: Computer Bulletin Boards Have Captivated the Attention of County Users.” Los Angeles Times, Ventura West edition, 30 September 1993, 6. ProQuest.

Financial Report of Geo. A. Hormel & Company. 16 November 1937, 12. ProQuest Annual Reports.

Lewis, Peter H. “Arizona Lawyers Form Company for Internet Advertising.” New York Times, 7 May 1994, 51. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2001, modified June 2020, s.v. spam, v.; second edition, 1989 with draft edition of June 2001, s.v. Spam, n.

“Piggly Wiggly” (Advertisement). Minneapolis Tribune, 25 June 1937, 9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Quittner, Joshua. “Far Out Welcome to Their World Built of MUD.” Newsday, Nassau and Suffolk edition, 7 November 1993, 3. ProQuest.

Raymond, Eric. Jargon File, version 2.9.6, 16 August 1991.

“Spam.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, second edition. Andrew F. Smith, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Oxfordreference.com.

“Trade-Marks.” Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, 483.4, 26 October 1937, 750. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zimmer, Ben. “How a Mystery Meat Became an Inbox Invader.” Wall Street Journal, 26 January 2019, C3. ProQuest Recent Newspapers.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2021. Licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

smart aleck

November 23, 2021

23 November 2021

A smart aleck or smart alec is a person who annoyingly expresses their knowledge or intelligence, a person who is too clever by half. While the meaning is well established and clear, the etymology is not. We just don’t know who the original Aleck or Alec was. All we know is that the phrase first appeared in the 1860s and most likely arose in the American West.

The first recorded use of smart aleck that I know of is in the Weekly Butte Record of Oroville, California on 16 May 1863:

“SMART ALECK” IN THE PULPIT.—A story is told of an old minister, who once announced to his hearers that on a following Sabbath he would tell his people what time to trim apple trees. The announcement had the desired effect, drawing out a large congregation. At the close of the service he announced that the time for his hearers to trim apple trees was when their tools were sharp.

There is also an appearance of the phrase in the New York Clipper of 2 January 1864. Of the early uses, this is the only one that does not come out of the American West. It appears in an article critical of the state legislature in Albany for banning the employment of female waiters in concert halls because their presence created an unwholesome atmosphere and how one enterprising man got around the proscription:

Soon after the bursting up of the “upper houses” from the loss of one of their principal attractions, the barmaids, he took it into his head to establish something new, whereby he could laugh in his sleeve at the “smart Alecs” of Albany town, and started a saloon with no other performance than a piano and violin, similar to the German “museke” shops, where female waiters had been tolerated without let or hindrance, so popular among our friends from Bingen-on-the-Rhine, or Rotterdam.

Back in the Western United States, the Nevada Gold Hills Daily of 9 January 1865 has this story about a smart aleck who tried to make fun of two Chinese immigrants and got his comeuppance:

Yesterday afternoon, as a crowd of idlers were standing on the corner of B and Union streets, Virginia, two Chinamen with uncommonly long tails passed by, when a smart chap “from Mud Springs” thought it would be a very fine joke to tie these two Johns together by the tails, and quietly advancing, succeeded in partly effecting his object, when a laugh from the crowd caused one of the twain (not Mark Twain) to turn his head, when he saw what the “smart Aleck” was about. John the larger at once turned right about face, rolled up his sleeves, exposing a pair of well-muscled arms, on which were figures of an anchor engraved in India ink, and at once led off with his left, which took effect on the smart chap’s nose. Smarty came back, but was met with a stinger under his ear, and in about two minutes John had soundly whaled the fellow, to the great delight of the bystanders.

The reference to Mark Twain made me question whether the 1865 date was correct, as Twain had not yet achieved widespread notoriety by this date, but the other dates in the paper confirmed it was correct. It turns out that he was something of a local celebrity at the time this newspaper piece appeared. Samuel Clemens had lived and worked in Nevada from 1861–63 and had first used his pen name while writing there.

Another early Nevada usage is in the Carson Appeal of 17 October 1865. Unfortunately, I do not have access to this issue of the paper, so I do not know the larger context for the usage. All I have is this snippet as it appears in various dictionaries:

Halloa, old smart Aleck—how is the complimentary vote for Ashley?

Turf, Field, and Farm of 17 February 1866 tells of a horse’s groom who was a smart aleck:

Belmont sustained an injury three years ago, from which he never recovered. Having received a slight contusion on the hock, a blundering groom, one of the “smart Aleck” order and a real learned ignoramus, put on a blister which took off hair and hide at once, and came near taking off the horse.

And the Salt Lake City Telegraph of 24 October 1866 uses the phrase to describe a city slicker:

“SMART ALECK.”—A young gentleman of the city, describing affairs in the country, writes that “the cows often act very badly about being milked; sometimes, when you are almost through they kick the milk all over, and you have to go to work and milk them right over again.”

Finally, there is this use from Nevada’s Carson Daily Appeal of 14 December 1867, an issue of that paper that has been digitized:

Because the plastering, overhead, in the Ormsby House bar-room fell off in a big patch on Thursday night, we don’t understand why the smart Alecs around town should grin and snicker and talk, in a knowing way, about two newly married couple [sic] having been among the guests at that excellent hotel on the night in question. It is most likely that the plastering was cracked by the heat—from the stove.

The fact that we have no idea of the identity of original smart Aleck has not deterred people from guessing. Some have suggested that the term derives from a character, Dr. Smart-Allick, created by British humorist J.B. Morton. But the term was well-established decades before Morton was even born—so Morton took his character’s name from the term, not vice versa.

Another guess was made by Gerald Cohen in a 1985 article in Studies in Slang. Cohen traces the origin to an 1840s New York City thief and confidence man named Aleck Hoag and hypothesizes that it was police who dubbed him “Smart Aleck,” because he was too clever by half. In the article, Cohen outlines Hoag’s criminal career in detail, but the article provides no evidence linking Hoag to the phrase, only conjecture. There is no more reason for thinking Hoag is the phrase’s inspiration than there is for anyone else of that name.

Discuss this post

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. smart aleck, n.

“At the Wrong End.” Gold Hill Daily News (Nevada), 9 January 1865, 3. Newspapers.com.

“Broadway Below the Sidewalk: Pretty Waiter Girls and Underground Concert Halls.” New York Clipper, 2 January 1864, 300. Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections.

Cohen, Gerald Leonard. “Origin of Smart Aleck.” Studies in Slang, vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985, 85–105.

“Cosmo-Belmont.” Turf, Field, and Farm, 17 February 1866, 104. ProQuest Magazines.

Goranson, Stephen. “‘smart Alecs’ 1864 antedating.” ADS-L, 1 January 2020.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. smart aleck, n.

Merriam-Webster.com, 2021, s.v. smart aleck, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2013, modified December 2020, s.v. smart alec, n. and adj.

“Smart Aleck.” Salt Lake City Telegraph, 24 October 1866, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Smart Aleck in the Pulpit.” Weekly Butte Record (Oroville, California), 16 May 1863, 4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers.

“What of It?” Carson Daily Appeal (Carson City, Nevada), 14 December 1867, 3. Newspapers.com.

Image credit: Egos, 2020. imgflip.com.

son of a gun

November 22, 2021

22 November 2021

The epithet son of a gun is a euphemism for son of a whore or son of a bitch. It first appears in print in the opening years of the eighteenth century. There is this dialogue from the Observator of 27–31 January 1705 in which one interlocutor uses the phrase son of a whore, and the second euphemizes it to son of a gun:

Country-m[an]. Why can’t you let me Jest, you may talk in Earnest your self if you please; I was at a Coffee-House t’other Day, and there a Man was saying, that the Country-man, meaning my own Dear self, was become the Observators Jester; Aye says another, he’s the Observators Terræ Filius. What’s the meaning of that Cramp Name?
Obs[ervator]. A TerræFilius, is the University Merry-Andrew, the Fool in the Play, but the Genuine Signification of the Word is Son of a Whore.
Country-m. Did his Worship mean so? He’s a Son of a Gun for his Pains; and had I understood his Gibberish, I should have Rub’d down his Calves-hide for his Sauciness.

Why gun was chosen as the substitute for the offending word is unknown. It is probably just an arbitrary choice. But in this early use in the British Apollo of 7–9 July 1708, gun was chosen, at least in part, for the rhyme:

You Apollo’s Son,
You’r a Son of a Gun,
Made up with Bamboosle,
You directly I’le puzzel.
Pray how many Feet has a Louse.
Have recourse to your Head;
For there they were Bred;
You may look any where,
I believe they are there;
Let me have no shuffling Excuse.

There is this from the 1727 play La Parodia del Pastor Fido, a play that was performed in London in both Italian and in English. This passage is from a scene in which the characters are about to enter a cave in which Mirtello and his lover Amarilli are hiding. Mirtillo says:

Do not make so much Noise,
Mister Son of a Gun,
That here’s nothing mislaid.

The Italian version of the play reads fío d’una ditta, which literally means son of a business firm. Not being conversant in eighteenth-century Italian idiom, my best guess is that this is an idiom meaning son of a whore, as ditta is a feminine noun meaning firm or enterprise, in other words, a woman engaged in trade of a sort.

And this from Nicolas Babble’s 1757 edition of The Prater:

Before I turned the corner of the street I lodge in, I was overtaken by two rascally barbers boys, who jammed me between them, and besmeared me with powder; and while I was endeavoring to brush it off, a son of a gun of chimney sweeper covered one side of my coat with soot.

And this from John Dunton’s 1762 The Life, Travels, and Adventures of Christopher Wagstaff, Gentleman, in which the writer proposes that different classes and types of people be referred to as breeds of dog, such as “women’s men” and fops as lap-dogs, soldiers and sailors as bull-dogs, and lawyers as blood-hounds, thus confirming that in this case, at least, gun is a euphemism for bitch:

I will not needlessly detain the judicious reader with enumerating the many obvious uses and conveniences of such an arrangement as this; but will only add, that among the many considerable advantages this would not be the smallest—that hereby the use of sundry names and appellations, of which some are ridiculous, and others are at least equally odious, and at the same time of not one half the significance and pertinency as these dog-names, would for the future be happily superseded—such as sc--nd--l, v-ll--n, son of a wh-re, son of a gun, and son of a tin-tan-tinderbox. Upon the whole, it appears we cannot call names with any tolerable propriety and discretion but by some such method as that offered in this dissertation; and by consequence, it may follow that, whatever he may be besides, every mother’s son among us is a son of a b-tch.

Sometimes a false legend of a term’s origins has been around for years and writings and citations can be found, some quite old, that seem to bear out the legendary origin. Such is the case with the myth of a nautical origin of the phrase son of a gun. The nautical explanation is that in the age of sail, women—wives, mistresses, and sex workers—were frequently on-board ship when in port or sailing in home waters and occasionally children would be born aboard ship. Common sailors slept on the gun deck and when on board, their wives and mistresses would sleep there too. If a child was born on board, it would likely be born on the gun deck. If male, such a child was referred to as a son of a gun. But this explanation only dates back to the mid-19th century, well after son of a gun was in common use. Admiral William Henry Smyth wrote the following in his 1867 book, the Sailor’s Word-book, one of the primary sources for data on 19th century nautical lingo:

SON OF A GUN. An epithet conveying contempt in a slight degree, and originally applied to boys born afloat, when women were permitted to accompany their husbands to sea; one admiral declared he literally was thus cradled, under the breast of a gun-carriage.

It’s a neat story, but unfortunately, it’s not true. As we have seen, son of a gun is just a euphemism, nothing more.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Babble, Nicholas. The Prater, second edition. London: T. Lownds, 1757, 105. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

The British Apollo, or Curious Amusements for the Ingenious. No. 43, 7–9 July 1708, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Burney Newspapers Collection.

Dunton, John. The Life, Travels, and Adventures of Christopher Wagstaff, Gentleman, vol. 1, London: J. Hinxman, 1762, 117–18. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Observator, 3.83, 27–31 January 1705, 1. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gun, n.

La Parodia del Pastor Fido: A Comick Opera. London: T. King, 1727, 38–39. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Smyth, William Henry. The Sailor’s Word-Book. London: 1867, 638. Algrove Publishing—Classic Reprint Series, 2004.

Image credit: Gold West Photoplay Company and William Sherry Service, 1919. Public domain image.

Thanks to Elisa Brilli for assistance in the Italian translation.

Soho

November 19, 2021

19 November 2021

Soho is the name of neighborhoods in two major cities, London and New York. The names, however, have very different etymologies, although the name of New York’s Soho was undoubtedly influenced and popularized by the name of the London district.

Surprising as it may seem, London’s Soho takes its name from an Anglo-Norman hunting cry, given when releasing the hounds to alert the dogs to the presence of the rabbit or hare (cf. tallyho) The district, now very urbanized, was once a hunting ground for nobility living in London.

The cry first appears on a Scottish seal from 1307 that bears an image of a hare with the motto Sohou Sohou. And a manuscript on hunting from c.1420 by William Twiti, chief huntsman for King Edward II, and later amplified and extended, probably by John Giffard, has this to say about the cry:

And if ye hounte at the hare, ye shalle sey atte vncouplyng, hors de couple, avaunt!, and after, iij tymes, So-how, so-how, so-how! And ye shalle seye, Sa, sa, cy avaunt, so-how!
(And if you hunt the hare, you must say when uncoupling the hounds, uncouple forward!, and after three times, Soho, soho, soho! And you must say, Here, here, come on, soho!)

By the late seventeenth century, Soho had become the name for the district, a legacy from its former use as a hunting ground. A 1675 broadsheet advertisement for a riding academy, interestingly one that used mechanical horses, gives the academy’s location as:

In the MILITARY GROUND between LEICESTER-HOUSE and the SOHOE.

And in 1677, a biography of the thief Thomas Sadler, who gained infamy and was hanged for stealing the ceremonial mace from the Lord High Chancellor’s home while that eminence was asleep, refers to the district as Soe-hoe:

This is certain, That when he became Capable of Working, he was put forth to the Honest Laborious Trade of Brickmaking; which he followed for two or three years after the Dreadful Fire in Sixty Six, both at Knights-bridge, Soe-hoe, and other places neer the Town, and had gain'd the Creditable Repute of a Civil Industrious Youngman; till happening into the unhappy Acquaintance of a Lewd Woman in St. Gileses, she seduc'd him to the Expence of his Money, and neglect of his business; and brought him acquainted with a Gang of thieves.

2013 street map of New York City’s Soho district

New York’s Soho, on the other hand, has a much more prosaic origin. It’s an acronym for South of Houston Street. (Which, by the way, is pronounced /haʊ stən/, unlike like the city in Texas, which is /hju stən/. The street is named for William Houstoun, who spelled his name in various ways and represented Georgia in the Continental Congress and at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The Texas city, in contrast, is named for General Sam Houston, the first president of an independent Texas.) The district, the South Houston Industrial/Study Area was defined in the early 1960s when it was proposed as a neighborhood ripe for demolition, to be replaced by expressways and middle-income housing, despite it being a thriving neighborhood of businesses and Black and Puerto Rican housing. The New York Times of 2 June 1963, describes the district, but does not yet use the acronym Soho:

The City Planning Commission, in its report to the Mayor, asserts the section—known as the South Houston Study Area—should be preserved for the 651 business establishments it says are flourishing there.
[...]
However, the Middle Income Cooperators of Greenwich Village, a citizens’ housing group that claims 5,000 members, is putting heavy pressure on the city to demolish the 12-block area and put up middle-income housing.
[...]
The Planning Commission’s staff found 60 per cent of the workers in the area to be Negro and Puerto Rican. These groups have a high unemployment rate in the city.
The report asserts that between 1954 and 1958 about 62,000 production jobs were eliminated in Manhattan and 12,000 more in other boroughs through attrition of industrial space. It cites the consequent increased unemployment and welfare expenses.
The South Houston Industrial Area extends from Houston Street south to Broome Street between Broadway and West Broadway. The commission says it is a thriving business community. Major rehabilitation, it adds, would result in rent increases that the businesses could not afford.

The proposed demolition never happened, but the gentrification did, with the industrial spaces turned into artist lofts before the artists were driven out by rising rents. The acronym Soho is in place by 1970. From the New York Post of 1 April 1970:

With the recent influx of galleries in the south of Houston St. area (now dubbed “Soho”), general interest in lofts is up again. And non-artists, charmed by the relative low rents and generous spaces, are now competing for the little space that’s left. This added to the area’s new-found glamor has started to raise the rents to uptown levels.

While the name of the New York City neighborhood does not directly come from the name of its London counterpart, its coinage and continued use was undoubtedly influenced by London’s Soho.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Academy. By the Kings Priviledge. London: John Wells, 1675. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Bain, Joseph, ed. “Seals Connected with Scotland, Unattached to Documents or Only to Fragments.” Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, vol. 2 of 5. Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1884, 539. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Burnham, Alexander. “Housing Dispute Put up to Mayor.” New York Times, 2 June 1963, 46. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. so-hou, int.

Mills, A. D. A Dictionary of London Place-Names, second ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010, Oxfordreference.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Soho, n.2, soho, int. and n.1.

Sadler’s Memoirs: or, the History of the Life and Death of that Famous Thief Thomas Sadler. London: P. Brooksby, 1677, 3–5 (pages misnumbered, there is no page 4). Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Scott-McNabb, David. The Middle English Text of The Art of Hunting by William Twiti. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009, 17, 64. London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian B.xii.

Solochek, Beverly. “The Lofty Approach to Living.” New York Post, 1 April 1970, 50 (Magazine page 6). Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Wright, Thomas and James Orchard Halliwell. “Le Venery de Twety.” Reliquiæ Antiquæ, vol. 1. London: John Russell Smith, 1845, 152. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian B.xii.

Image credit: Peter Fitzgerald, 2009, OpenStreetMap. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

soccer

November 18, 2021

18 November 2021

The sport known as football throughout most of the world is dubbed soccer in North America, where the word is used to differentiate the game from American-style football. In Britain and elsewhere, soccer is also occasionally used, but its use is rarer.

Soccer is a variation on Association football. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, two styles of football dominated, rugby football and Association football, the latter played professionally under the aegis of the Football Association, which codified the game’s rules. To differentiate the two styles, first university students then the population at large began to call them rugby or rugger and soccer. Eventually, as Association football achieved dominance, it became simply football in the UK, except when a term was needed to differentiate from rugby, in which case soccer would be used.

Varieties of football have been played since antiquity, but the modern game of Association football can be traced to 1863 and the founding of the Football Association in London. The term Association football appears by 1866, when it is used a name for the type of ball used in the game. From a 17 November 1866 advertisement in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle:

FOOTBALLS and the LAWS.—JOHN LILLYWHITE has now ON VIEW a very large STOCK of the Rugby and Association FOOTBALLS, which are warranted to be of the best manufacture. The Association Laws (published by authority) price 6d, per post 7d; on cardboard for the use in the pavillion 1s, per post is 2d.

I have found a use of Association football referring to the game itself from 1871, although I’m sure antedatings can be found. It’s in a version of the rules of the game published in the United States that year. The rulebook, edited by Charles Alcock, the head of the Football Association, was intended to proselytize the game to American universities:

I will merely therefore remark that to play with the feet is the main object of Association Football. Hands should not and must not be used. Difficult at first it may seem, but the abolition of handling and patting the ball will be found in every sense conducive to a better and more scientific game.

Soccer, spelled socker, appears by 1885, at first in school slang. From a letter published in the Oldhallian, the journal of the Old Hall School, Wellington, Shropshire from December 1885 about the game as it is played at Oxford University:

The ’Varsity played Aston Villa and were beaten after a very exciting game; this was pre-eminently the most important “Socker” game played in Oxford this term.

Another early use of socker is from the Boys’ Own Paper of 6 April 1889:

In ’Varsity patois Rugby is yclept “Rugger,” while Association has for its synonym “Socker.”

The soccer spelling is in place by 1891.

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Sources:

Advertisement. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (London), 17 November 1866, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

Alcock, Charles W., ed. The Book of Rules of the Game of Foot Ball, as Adopted and Played by the English Football Associations. New York: Peck and Snyder, 1871, 13. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Letter. The Oldhallian, 5.6, December 1885, 171. Google Books.

“Our Open Column. Football at Oxford.” The Boys’ Own Paper (London), 6 April 1889, 431. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2016, modified March 2021, s.v. soccer, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. association, n.

Photo credit: Rick Dikeman, 1996. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.