Warwick Hadfield: You've caved in
Warwick Hadfield on Nearpost Radio on Tuesday.
Despite what you read here, I'm very highbrow and enjoy listening every morning to Radio National's Breakfast programme with Fran Kelly. Love ya Fran, you are the best.
And at 7.35am every morning Australia's best all-round sports journo Warwick Hadfield fills us in, as only he can, on the days news in sport.
He's highly intelligent and unlike almost all other Australia journo's he's rarely pro or anti any particular code despite being a passionate lover of Geelong, AFL club.
Anyways up, Warwick has being calling football, well football, for some time out of respect for the organisation, the game and Warwick is just a smart observer of the times.
He does slip occasionally into the round-ball game or WorldGamearoos to seemingly avoid saying the dreaded word...football.
Well now after trying so hard, and here's me thinking it came naturally to Wazza, he's caved in.
He's now calling it soccer again. With confidence! And he seems to feel it fits right.
What you call the game doesn't concern me: What concerns me is why Warwick, our finest, has changed.
3 comments:
Hi Eamon, At least he is talking about it whatever he calls it. Most don't even know that the game exists and let alone that there are an ever increasing number of women palying the game. Heaven forbid that they talk about our National womens team that are currently playing in the ASEAN Championships in Vietnam and won a game against Thailand yesterday. I bet no where in Australia would this have been mentioned this morning on any radio or will any footage be put on the TV - is womens sport that bad?
I don't care what they call it as long the talking about it.
Indeed Anonymous and Neil. It's good he's got time for the game.
From his perspective I can see good, everyday linguistic reasons for using the word 'soccer'. He works in a realm of several football codes, all with mass followings, who call their game 'football'. Where that's the case - and he needs to be concise, consistent and routinely understood by his audience - specific terms come quite naturally and properly.
He would also have in his everyday work many uses for the word 'football' as a generic term, especially as people discuss the different 'football codes'. The generation of generic / specific language where it is helpful for meaning (like in Australia in this case) is natural, spontaneous and normal. Attempting to force it to be otherwise is, in my view, essentially ideological, and leaves us with some very flimsy defenses where we need none at all.
By the way Hi Eamonn. Hope all is well. Exciting times for fans of... you know... the game.
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