Decoding Football Language: A Study of Terms and Their Meanings

Here, just in time for another episode.

Of the Pigskin Dispatch podcast, we're going to talk about some originations of words in the game of football, hints elsewhere in the English language, and the origination of a word that represents a college team.

It's all coming up for you in this episode of the Pigskin Dispatch, right after this.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And welcome to another week as we get closer and closer to the football season that's coming soon.

We have preseason games have just started and we are getting excited about the college game as we're reading about our favorite teams from the college pro level and even high school levels in your local websites and local newspapers, if you still still get those in this day and age.

Everybody's getting excited, starting to practice and pads are clicking and clacking all over the, the this great country of ours and it's getting excited and it just makes you go and start to think about a little bit about the game of football and maybe some ways, maybe that you don't normally do or maybe it's just me that's doing that.

You know, it's sort of one of those things like, you know, the old saying where's why do you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway kind of opposite names for things that we've come up in nomenclatures for items.

And that happens a lot in the game of football.

You know, for instance, the position of tackle and the term of tackle both are very commonly used in football games.

And if you listen to any announcers, you'll hear the word tackle probably said as many as much as any other word in, you know, the English language during a common broadcast because you're talking about two separately different things.

And why is, why are they both the same?

Well, in early football they had the, you know, the gentleman on the end of the defensive lines were the ones that would normally make all most of the tackles and by tackling not only the ball carrier but but it was common that they would wrap up and grapple the ends of the line, sort of tying up that the flanks of the line so forcing the runs to go the inside.

So that's why they were called the tackles and the offensive tackles where they were blocking the tacklers from tackling them.

So they were in a tackle position all the time.

And I believe that's how the nomenclature came up.

If not, you can write us@Pixian dispatchmail.com and correct us on that.

But I, from my understanding, that is the terminology in there.

But you also have the word safety pops up on a couple things, a couple different things.

You have that in three levels.

First of all, you have the personal safety and the player safety.

You know, just keeping people from getting hurt or injured or.

Or worse in the game.

So you have rules and equipment to protect them the best they can.

It's a dangerous game, and it's contact and hitting and a lot of violence going on in a game of football.

But safety is also the position nomenclature for the deepest men in the defensive backfield.

So, you know, the safeties are the two guys that do it.

You have a free safety, strong safety, you know, different terminologies for safety in a box safety, but those are the guys that are sort of that safety valve.

If, if the runner or the pass gets by everybody else, well, they're the last hope of stopping them as a defender.

So.

So that's where that term safety comes in.

And then you have the very unique and uncommon scoring play of the safety where if the offense gets tackled behind their own line or commits a foul behind their own goal line, well, it turns up in two points awarded to.

The defending team and thus a safety.

So three different levels of safety there.

So you really got to know what you're talking about there.

That.

That as well.

And, you know, I guess the, the.

Name football itself is sort of a.

A nomenclature that you have to really try, try to figure out.

First of all, why do we call it football when there are fewer plays where the foot and the ball meet each other than there are with the hands?

Why is it called handball?

Why?

You know, these are questions that people that are not close to the game and don't understand the history ask.

Well, we know from, you know, many.

Talks with Timothy p. Brown@footballarchaeology.com and, you know, going Dr. Tony Collins, and, you know, we've had a lot of different guests tell us why this is happening.

Because football is.

Was derived from rugby and soccer, and.

Over in Europe they were called football.

Soccer.

Very understandably why it's called football over in Europe still to this day.

Because there is the ball and the.

Foot are contacting each other quite often.

In a game, much more often than the game of American football.

But these are all derivatives of the same root and parent of football.

And rugby is an offshoot.

Football's an offshoot of rugby and soccer association.

Soccer.

Is that where the name soccer comes from?

Is a form of that as well.

Coliseo in Italy and things like that.

Those are all games that are part of football, Australian Rules football and all.

The different derivatives of that too.

Gaelic football.

So they're all games of football just played by different rules and slight variations and sometimes wide arranged variations in the game.

So that's what, that's where the name football comes from.

So just some interesting things if you think about it.

You just have to know what term and how it's being used in a sentence and how it's applied during the.

Game to know what people are talking about.

Otherwise it's people outside the game of the gridiron or sit there scratching their head, saying, what the heck are these people talking to, talking their own language.

They're saying the same words over and over.

But we understand it.

Our primal grunts help us to understand the game.

Just like using the words tackle football and safety are common.

There's lots of other ones in there too.

And if you have some those you want to share, go ahead and email us@pigskindispatchmail.com and we'd love to talk about those too.

But that's it for that segment here, getting some things off our mind as we start the week of the football season getting closer.

And our next segment, we have some other interesting things.

It's the origination of a nickname of a college football team.

We have that coming up for you.

In just a moment.

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It's hosted by Bob Swick, the publisher and editor of Grier and Greats magazine.

And Joe Squire is a longtime contributor to that magazine.

So join Bob and Joe and as they go through football history, talking about the memorabilia and the great legendary players and games of the American gridiron on the Gridiron Greats Magazine podcast.

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And you are listening to the Pigskin Dispatch.

You know, I love doing this early on a couple years ago we were trying to do this weekly and talk about some of the names of football teams and where maybe that name originated from.

The nicknames, the monikers, the, the mascots.

And why did, why are teams called that?

One of the most oddest names in college football is the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

Now we just, most of us like myself have grown up just knowing the name Cornhusker.

So you just associate it with Nebraska, but you never really sit there and you think about it.

Why are they called the Corn Huskers?

Most of the time mascots are something that should be feared by an opponent.

You know, a bulldog or a tiger or you know, a knight or anything like that.

That's kind of brings fear and respect and honor.

But a Corn Husker, you know, what comes to your mind when you hear Corn Husker?

I, I picture maybe some, a family out in the, the backyard, you know, husking some corn and throwing the corn cob and kernels into a basket and throwing the shucks away, you know, but that, that has some truth to it.

But that's not all what it's meant to be as we're going to get here in the story of why the Corn Huskers of Nebraska are called the Corn Huskers.

Now the University of Nebraska has a piece out that in the late 19th century that the team that played football at the University of Nebraska was called, you know, the Old Gold Knights for.

A couple years and then more commonly.

They were called the Bug Eaters.

Now you thought Cornhuskers was a weird name.

How about Bug Eaters?

And what exactly why were they called the Bug Eaters?

You know, I always thought that was kind of a humorous myself and probably some of their opponents did.

But the Bug Eaters that the team was referring to was a very well respected item.

There were some variations of bats that lived in the mid middle of the country in Nebraska area that would fly over the crops and eat all the insects and keep the insects from, you know, populating on the crops and eating the crops all up.

So these bug eaters were really a great, well liked item and animal by farmers in the Midwest and very well respected enough that they should name their football team that they support at their local University of Nebraska.

Well, one reporter decided, you know, and I guess the other thing, the way the association went is that the Nebraska team was going up and eating up all the teams around or defeating them in the Midwest.

Much like the bug eater, bats were eating up the insects.

Well, they.

They were eating up all the other teams around the Midwest.

And so the association with the bug eaters came up.

But one journalist decided after a losing season that, hey, maybe this isn't the.

Right way to do it.

His name was from Lincoln, Nebraska, sports writer Charles S. Sherman, according to the Nebraska University's website.

And he came up with the idea that said, you know, I really don't like calling them the Bug Eaters and Old Gold Knights.

Really, that's sort of fallen off.

People didn't really like that.

But, you know, he would go and cover games with Nebraska, would play Iowa.

And Iowa at one time was called the Cornhuskers.

But their fans and their journalists and newspaper men around there sort of didn't really like the name Cornhuskers.

They fell off of that because they do a lot of the same agricultural.

Things in Iowa that were done in Nebraska.

So.

But they really liked Hawkeyes.

So the Iowa with the Hawkeyes.

Well, Mr. Sherman picked up on this and decided, hey, you know, Corn Huskers is kind of a cool name, and we do that a lot here in Nebraska as a lot of corn is growing there.

So he started calling them the Nebraska Corn Huskers.

And some of his pieces in the.

Newspaper, well, it was.

It didn't take long.

In the early 20th century, the name caught on so much that the fans and the student body and the school adopted the name Cornhuskers for the Nebraska sports teams and in particular, their football team.

It was resonated and it was representative of the people of the area of Nebraska and what they did, and they were proud of it.

They're supplying corn to the nation and the breadbasket of America, and they felt proud of that, proud enough to display it as their name.

And it's caught on.

And it stayed, you know, over a century and a quarter later, they still have that same name, well respected Nebraska Cornhuskers.

And what a great name.

It is unique only to them and I guess for a little bit, the University of Iowa and the.

The late 19th century.

But there you have it.

That's why the Corn Huskers are the Corn Huskers and why some of those other names that we talked at the top of the show takes us back to, you know, why things are that way.

But we still don't have the answer to why do you drive on the parkway and park on a driveway?

We have got to still figure that one out.

But that's not a football question.

That's for another time, another podcast perhaps.

But that's the history we have for you today.

Hope you enjoy it.

Hope you have a great week because we have a great week scheduled for you.

We are going to be hitting with the all the cylinders here this week, starting off tomorrow with FootballArchaeology.com's Timothy B.

Brown joining us for another one of his famous tidbits.

We're going to get a visit from Gridiron Intelligence's Thomas hall talking about some more of his analytics on his website as he prepares for the season.

And we have a few more surprises for you as well, but you can always catch us on YouTube.

We have multiple YouTube videos going out weekly, usually at least once a day.

Sometimes there's a couple.

We're trying to get caught up on our Football by Number series by putting some of those videos out from some of, you know, our recordings and podcasts that we did back a few years ago and trying to catch up on those.

So revamping that part of the site up, revamping the podcast and YouTube channel and bringing football history to you as we approach football season.

So until next time, everybody have a.

Great, great iron day.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

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