1:39 p.m., 12.11.03
The Evolution of a Word

A short history of the use and devolution of the word "football."

When the game began and the great minds who invented it decided to name it, the decision wasn't a difficult one. There was a ball, and you kicked it with your foot, and that was the game's defining feature. Ball + foot. Foot ball. Or Ballfoot. I'm glad they went with foot ball.

At some stage in the game's evolution, after it had come across to Australia from its Gaelic roots and been bastardised when some twat couldn't afford a proper round ball, foot ball became very popular.

So popular, in fact, that many Australians found themselves saying "foot ball" several times a day. As with any popular phrase, it soon contracted through quick speech to a single word: Football.

Not far beyond this stage, some efficiency-minded Australian decided that even saying "football" five times a day was wasting valuable seconds and causing the public to deal with unnecessarily tiresome sibillance.

He christened it "footy," as a labour saving measure. This was the first point at which the name's original semantic brilliance was lost. No longer were the game's two primary elements, the foot and the ball, equally represented in the nomenclature. No, now there was the foot, and an "ee," which was neither descriptive nor particularly respectful to the ball - without which the game wouldn't be much fun anyway.

Even this contraction, however, was still forcing Collingwood residents and the footballing public at large to pronounce a "t," which was out of the scope of their ordinary charter. The conversion from "footy" to "foody" was a decision of the people, by the people and for the people.

Naturally, residents of Melbourne's linguistically progressive Western suburbs are keen to continue the syllabic rationalisation of the word - a verbal downsizing, if you wish.

This has begun to manifest itself in a pronunciation that renders the entire word in one syllable: "fooey," or "fooi."

We can only expect this trend to continue once the public realises there's no need for such an awkward diphthong as "oo-ie" in the word, and moves to strike the troublesome "ee" sound from the record. And naturally the "f" at the beginning will become redundant, as everyone will know what they're talking about.

What I propose is that we'll end up with the most pared-down version of the word possible - the monosyllabic grunt "oo."

So you can see how we've progressed from the elitist and clearly non-populist "foot ball," to the current "fooi," all the way to an extrapolated future "oo."

Which is an ironic circle of sorts, as it's probably what they initially called the game when the first caveman booted the severed head of a rival between two trees in celebration of some sort of victory.

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