Once upon a time, back in the early days of the Dreamwidth Open Beta, zarhooie and I started talking on the phone.

A lot.

Now, at this time, I had just recently moved in to my little hole-in-the-hill apartment, which involves steel-reinforced concrete and is basically a Faraday cage wrapped in stone. This does not improve the already dodgy signal from being on the wrong side of the hill.

Eventually (after far too long) I realized that instead of keeping my head and the phone in the cubic-foot sphere of reasonably reliable cellphone signal, I could in fact just leave the phone there, and use my Bluetooth headset.

One small problem.

These were still the days before internal-battery small-electronics devices had more or less standardized on MicroUSB as the charging solution. The very nice Plantronics headset I had at the time had a tiny and inconvenient plug which wasn't either MiniUSB or MicroUSB, and I did not have particularly many unoccupied outlets near the computer desk. Therefore, I had it sitting on the kitchen peninsula by the door.

I could take short calls without the headset, but for anything lasting more than a minute or two, I'd want to grab the headset. So when Kat called, I'd answer the phone. "Hold on, I'm getting my headset," I'd say.

My apartment is tiny. It's about twelve steps, round trip, between my desk and the kitchen peninsula.

Kat is sarcastic.

"Do you have to run all the way across the football field to get it?" she asked once, or words to that effect.

"Yes, Kat, I just sprinted a full six hundred yards in thirty seconds to get my headset. To talk to you. Because I love you."

I might also be sarcastic. Just a little.


For whatever reason, the "football field" joke caught on. And as is the way of these things, the shorthand got elided further and further. And then one day, Kat asked something like: "Hi Azzie! Do you have to go get your football field?"

"Nope, I saw you sign off, I already got it."

From then on, the headset itself was known as the "football field", resulting in baffling phrases like "I lost my football field, so I've got to stop by Target" and "This football field sounds much crappier than the last one." "Well, it is a crappy football field, it's got a crappy microphone."


And this concludes today's explanation of the surreal phrases from my life.

A lot of this is from the legacy #lj_s crowd of '08 or so; there's stuff from #dw and other bits creeping in now.


!PLEH?? -- "Help!" spelled backwards. There was a notable request.

zhzh -- LJ, transliterated back from russian.

cleats -- from Azz's personal shorthand when reviewing suggestions. This is short for "This idea is bad, poorly worded, or otherwise controversial enough that the entire readership of the community will jump up and down on the original poster, wearing cleats." This may or may not also mean "Please go firmly point out why this idea is bad before someone gets the idea that it might have been good."

teapatty -- re-nicking to [your nick]|teapatty indicates that you are drunk. This is because someone attempted to state that they were "not drunk, repeat, not drunk". Unfortunately, this came out as "not drunk, teapatty, not drunk". Sobriety fail, but IRC meme win.

oot -- Out, spelled Canadian-style.

Adding extra 'u's to words -- poking fun at the differences between American and Commonwealth English spelling.

"go fly a kite" -- Jackass 2.5 reference. This involves Malerin's drunken movie-watching habits.

dead manta -- deleted, purged, and renamed to. (from deadmantalks; ex_deadmanta171) // any problem involving unwanted deletion-and-purging, or just plain deletion-and-purging

IRC pastry:
Stickybun or cinnamon roll: Auto-op
Hot cross bun: Voiced operator
Cannoli or Danish: Half-op
Super-Op: pretzel
Founder: croissant

"Alton Brown anal nachos" -- Alton Brown's rather excessively tidy nachos. Collided with the doggy style nachos discussion in #dw.

doggy style nachos -- Originally the twisted brainchild of AK-47 Guy, this involves having doggy-style sex while eating nachos served off the back of one's partner. Discussed extensively in #dw and found to be vastly impractical for a number of reasons including hot cheese, excessive jolting, and Alton Brown.

AK-47 Guy -- Sadly, a real person, who overreacted to a drunken hug from another man by leaping into the closet and inviting his guests to leave by brandishing an AK-47 at them. (Them = JD, Azz, and Azz's then-roommate and then-future roommate.)

jug -- some phones don't like it when you try to type kthx, and come up with jug instead. Jug is now an accepted substitute for kthx.

Questionable Content -- A webcomic, rather than content that is actually questionable, though I imagine there's some of that too.
XKCD -- Another webcomic.

bees -- Between jld's regular invocation of Swarm, Eddie Izzard on beekeeping, "that'll give you bees", Urethra Bees, That Damned Bee from Fight the Future, and that time I tried to have a Skype call with a bunch of fish, bees are a thing. Also a certain fairy queen.