In the US and Canada, we call it soccer. Pretty much anywhere else in this World Cup crazed world, it's called football.

So how did one sport get two very different tags? With only one of them seeming to have any relevance to the game at all? According to the wordsmiths over at Dictionary.com, you can blame it on a guy who fancied himself a 19th century Snoop Dogg...

Back in England in the 1800's, kids made up their own versions of the game of "football" and assigned rules at random. (Kind of like how we played stickball when I was a kid.) Then, to take all the fun out of it, a bunch of private schools got together to standardize the rules, which much like anything soccer/football related, led to lots of arguing.

Those arguments broke the footballers into two factions: those who preferred Rugby football (named after a school called Rugby), and those who didn't like getting banged around and liked to play Association football, named after the Football Association.

So here's where the Snoop Dogg of his day comes in. He's Charles Wreford-Brown, one of Association football’s early heroes. Much like Snoop had a way with adding "-izzle" to the end of words so they'd rhyme in his raps, back then there was a slang fad they called an Oxford-er. In which they'd shorten a word and add "-er" on the end. Breakfast becomes "brekker." Rugby becomes "rugger." Association football was called "footer," but Brown had a different idea. Fo' shizzle.

He took the word Association, chopped off the "A", sliced off the "–iation" from 'sociation and called it "soccer" instead. Weird, but true. It may not be the most logical name in the history of sports, but his influence is one of the reasons we don’t have footer leagues today.

Since American football had already taken off by the time Association football became popular in the U.S., the name soccer stuck. But not right away. The governing body for soccer in the US was called the United States Soccer Football Association until 1974. Sadly, had Snoop been around earlier, we all could have been playing "footbizzle" instead.