bread : Bread comes from the Old English word of the same spelling (though different pronunciation), but in Old English the word had the more general meaning of 'morsel' or even 'piece of food.' It descends from one of two proto-Germanic words—either *brautham ('brew') or *braudsmon- ('fragments, bits')—and it eventually replaced the original OE word for bread, which was hlaf (Hlaf, of course, lives on in the modern loaf). I don't know what the staff of life is supposed to mean, but clearly bread is important stuff, enough that it came to stand in for food in general. And more than food, too: the expression bread-winner dates from 1818 and people were using bread to mean 'money' by the 1940s.
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garlic : Garlic is clearly a traditional English plant, despite it's near total absence in historic English cooking, because it's name is pure Old English. The OE garleac is a compound word combining gar ('spear') with leac ('leek'). Presumably our Anglo-Saxon forbearers felt that a head of garlic resembles a spear point, especially when compared to the softly rounded bulb of the regular, non-spear leek. The spear imagery might also be appropriate in terms of garlic's potency: the well-known phenomenon of garlic breath is due to the fact that the chemical compounds which give garlic its strong flavor cannot be digested, but rather are absorbed by the blood and subsequently released by the lungs. No doubt the Anglo Saxons preferred to keep garlic-lovers at spear's length.
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foosball : Foosball is a common name for the game that is otherwise known as table football or table soccer. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the strange appellation: it comes from the German word for football, Fußball, thanks to the fact that the game was brought to the US from Germany by a soldier named Lawrence Patterson. He was taken by the game while stationed in Germany in 1960, and upon his return to the States he trademarked the Foosball name and began manufacturing tables. Interestingly, the game isn't called Fußball in Germany, since that is reserved for football itself; rather, it's known as Kicker or Tischfußball (table-football). Nor is it necessarily of German origin; it may be that it was invented in Spain, France, or elsewhere. It's too bad that Patterson wasn't stationed in France; if he had been, the game might now be known by it's French name of baby-foot!
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rugby : Rugby is the name given to the version of football invented at the school of the same name. The game popular at Rugby began to be known as such after the formation of the Football Association in 1863; proponents of carrying the ball and violently tackling your opponents (known as hacking resisted the elimination of those parts of the sport in Association Football and kept on playing in their traditional fashion. Since then other games have split off from the pro-hacking form of the sport, including the American and Australian forms of football. Rugby itself has also split into two different sports, known as rugby league and rugby union, which are played using slightly different rules.
The name rugby itself comes ultimately from the town of Rugby in Warwickshire, after which the school was named. The town's name comes from the Old English description of the place as Hrocan byrig (Hroca's fortress) or hroc byrig (rocky fortress); by the time of the Norman Conquest this had been collapsed to Rocheberie. By 1300 the -berie component was replaced by -by (a shift seen in a great many English town names), and the loss of the guttural /ch/ in English led to a reanalyzation of the word as containing a g.
I must say, good old etymological analysis is much less complicated than trying to figure out the complicated history of these various football games.
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football : Football is a natural name for a game that involved moving a ball around with the feet, although developments in the rules have led to its application to a number of games that require very little foot-play. While kicking-related ball games date back to ancient times, the first references to football as such date back to England in the Middle Ages; its first mention (as foteball) comes in a 1409 law banning the sport (football hooliganism was apparently a problem very early on).
Throughout football's history the name was applied to a range of different games that involved both kicking and carrying and throwing the ball. In fact, some historians suggest that the name originally arose not because the ball was propelled by the feet, but because the game was played on foot by the common people rather than on horseback, as were more aristocratic amusements. In the Middle Ages the game was an anarchical affair pitting entire villages or guilds against each other, but by the 16th century school gym teachers (or their historical equivalents) were taming the sport. The first modern set of rules, known as the Cambridge Rules, were established in 1848; 1863 saw the establishment of the Football Association and the rules for what is now known as soccer. Even then, however, other sorts of games were also being called football, including rugby in England and American Football in the US. The latter is generally said to have been invented at Princeton in 1869.
As the Association form of football (soccer) gained popularity around the world, the name made its way phonetically into a number of other languages. Spanish, for example, has futbol, and similar forms are found in Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, French, Russian, and Turkish. In those languages, naturally, the component meanings of foot and ball are lost; how strange, then, that the game most associated with the use of the feet isn't named as such by most of its players, whereas the hand-oriented American and Australian games keep the football name.
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