11 February—You’ve got to hand it to Donald Trump. When he’s right, he’s right. Even if he shouldn’t be and he spoils it all by being himself. This time he’s right—at least in principle—about deadbeat NATO member nations. We certainly don’t want Russia attacking anybody for any reason. But Trump’s benighted, belligerent audience certainly ate it up.

Trump’s exquisitely valid point is, with only 11 of the 31 NATO members living up to their obligation of spending at least two percent of their gross domestic product on defense, why should the United States and Greece, for instance, each spending over 3.5 percent, pick up the tab for and defend countries spending too little. Or nothing, for that matter, like Iceland, which has no military budget per se, because it has no army but does have a militarized coast guard.

That may be a rhetorical question. Or maybe not.

So then Trump tells his enthusiastic audience of MAGA morons in South Carolina, “Ya gotta pay, ya gotta pay your bills.” This is a man who has avoided paying bills through the expedient of bankruptcy six times. And who knows what other stratagems he and his former CFO Allen Weisselberg and his army of lawyers have used to stiff creditors?

In all events, Donald Trump certainly knows how to work his crowds.

Moving on, then, The Monitor can assure its readers with absolute honesty, integrity, and pride that nobody but nobody on its staff has ever watched or listened to a Super Bowl game on any medium (or in person, for that matter, God forbid), for any reason whatsoever.

But The Monitor recognizes that too many readers can’t make that boast, much as they’d like to. So we’ll observe the day appropriately, with a story about football—football as it should be played, real football; football with no timeouts and only minimal padding.

In other words, soccer, the sport known outside the United States and Canada as association football. Or just plain football.

Why, you’re wondering, do Americans and Canadians call association football soccer? Well, strange as it may seem, you can blame that on Oxford University, at least on Oxford students with nothing better to do in the later nineteenth century. (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)

The Football Association had been formed in London in 1863 to standardize rules for the two types of football played in England at the time, what came to be known as association football and rugby football, the latter a delightfully brutal sport named after (delightfully brutal?) Rugby School.

Back then—and, to a certain extent, to this day—it was a cutesy feature of Oxonian slang to shorten words and add “er” or “ers” to the end. Champagne became champers, breakfast became brekker or brekkers, and a rotten person became a rotter, for instance; and rugby became rugger. (They did and do it to names, too.) At the same time, the slang slingers contracted association football to assoc and stuck on the “er,” resulting in assoccer; that, of course, was conveniently shortened to soccer.

Association football is sometimes, albeit rarely, referred to as soccer in the UK. Soccer is never referred to as football in the United States, but sometimes in Canada.

Winston Churchill was never recorded saying, “Football [soccer] is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.” But what’s so gentlemanly about soccer?

Vince Lombardi was recorded saying, “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser,” and “If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?”

Can’t beat that . . .