The silliest and simplest quiz ever

Although I admit I laugh for too much at the silly debates between soccer and gridiron fans over the word “football”, the quiz approximately painted to the left and originally found at BuzzFeed is just so simple as to be ludicrous.

I will note there that there are a few differences from the original BuzzFeed post:

1. Spacing could not be done perfectly even due to memory issues
2. Seashore did not provide enough space (maximum 8000 pixels vertically) to be sure of putting everything in, so I have not included the answer to the last question
3. I could not join the pictures in the fourth question together perfectly, so a grey line is retained
4. In the last one, an effort to colour properly the .tiff file led to one of the answers that was originally grey going white (8)

As with so many “real football” people, “football” is rigidly defined to mean soccer and contrasted exclusively to gridiron. No mention of other football codes – rugby, Australian Rules, Gaelic Football – is ever given. Only in the answer to the third question (where gridiron is called “handegg”) is gridiron given any name. This is rather strange if the writer wants to define football rigidly as soccer and insist that the word “football” not be used even as part of the name for any other sport. It would be more logical to explain it in the first answer rather than only in the third.

Alternatively, if the questionnaire had not the smallest intention of conveying so much as knowledge about gridiron or any other non-soccer sport called “football” by its fans, it might have been correct to not show “handegg” as the name for gridiron at any point in the list. By this means at least the taint of being pejorative – which means in practice being unable to defend one’s preferred sport against any other – would have been avoided. However, there is no effort to show why soccer is a better sport that gridiron (let alone other “football” codes like Australian Rules) at any point in the questionnaire. BuzzFeed’s questionnaire is one hundred percent about identification of “football”, which in turn is rigidly identified as what most Australians, and almost all Americans, Canadians and New Zealanders call “soccer”. Once one can get the first question correct, the rest is so easy as to be ludicrous.

At the end, the quiz says that the reader will never call football “soccer” again – and is presumably expected to call gridiron “handegg”. However, I am in no way fooled that the quiz is utterly ludicrous and serves no purpose but the doctrine that “football” must be used to refer exclusively to “soccer”.

The means used to make the questions could serve no other purpose but indoctrination: to make the reader into someone who wants soccer renamed football in the US, Canada and New Zealand, and wishes for the NFL – and presumably the AFL and the GAA – to become obliged to rename their own codes of football in order to meet demands from soccer to exclusive title to the word “football”. This is called a copyright on “football” by another advocate of this policy. Renaming would be troublesome for fans of those sports, and would no doubt be severely challenged by the NFL and the AFL if soccer forced it on them – with terrible costs for the sporting industry as a whole.

The ultimate goal of such a silly quiz is not clear. No person used to viewing “football” as gridiron would change their minds – indeed they would see it as jealousy on the part of soccer fans towards a sport that is more entertaining and demanding than gridiron fans believe soccer to be. For soccer fans, it could only deepen existing prejudices.