football-player, you base

   This curious insult is used by the earl of Kent to Oswald, Goneril’s steward, in Shakespeare’s King Lear. The game did not have a good reputation in the seventeenth century. According to Sir Thomas Elyot, writing in 1531, it was a game ‘wherein is nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence’. A football-player was therefore little more than a brawling ruffian. Such ruffians are unfortunately still associated with the game, though in Britain they now tend to be on the terraces or fighting in nearby streets. ‘Football-player’ occurs again as a vocative in North Dallas Forty, by Peter Gent. A man who associates with professional football-players, but is not one himself, says to a man he knows: ‘Fucking pro-football player. Big man. Goddam asshole, that’s what you are.’ The novel, which describes the world of professional American football, appears to prove that Sir Thomas Elyot’s view of the game would still be applicable.