What's Your Twenty?

Housemate and our male friend MC and I are all members of Relationship Club, as you know, but we also share the unifying characteristic of enjoying ridiculous nicknames and straightfaced humourous encoded language. One of us will come up with a nickname or a turn of phrase and another one will push it a little further and the third will make it into an acronym which then becomes the beginning of a new self-referential joke. For example, MC is online dating like a fiend, breaking women's hearts with no end. I've dabbled a bit but can't muster up much energy for it these days. We coach one another and forward emails and helped one another draft the delicate and problematic post date "I thought you were reasonably interesting and smart, but am not attracted to you in the least, so can we be friends?" letter. We call this the FLOD, short for the Form Letter of Death. MC and I have become expert in the very tactful FLOD. We get enthusiastically thanked for our FLODs. We've begun to explore a variation on the genre: the preemptive defensive FLOD (the PD-FLOD), whereby we write to the hapless date and attribute the FLOD to them (e.g. "I got the sense that you liked me, but you didn't feel that certain spark. I want you to know that I respect that, and understand, and would be happy just to be friends. In fact, I think that would be more comfortable for me, too, even though I had a terrific time blah blah blah.") Anyway. "FLOD" is a noun and a verb within our group now.

Anyway, this week we've adopted the trucker CB lingo of inquiring by cell phone "what's your twenty?" which one of us vaguely knew stood for location. Immediately another of us started also asking what someone's "forty" was, which somehow came to mean your expected arrival time. Now, of course, any question is fair game for a number. So Housemate just called, and, after discussing our respective twenties and forties, asked what I thought we should do for dinner. "You mean what's my thirty?" "Right." From now on I just know that, at any given time, in any given conversation, a number may be substituted for some question, and our specialized inner-circle language will keep on evolving.

Comments

[ogged]

I'm positive that this would make me homicidal.

[Scheherazade]

Ogged, I'm sure it's small consolation, but we do limit ourselves to doing this in private, only with one another, and do not inflict it on any who do not reveal the same sort of penchant for linguistic silliness.

[Andy B]

"[...] a race where each individual evolved a private spoken language to express nuances uniquely his own, and learned those of all his friends."
--Poul Anderson, "The Martyr"

[Scipio]

All jargon is a conspiracy of the professional against the laity.

-Daivd Mamet

[monica]

my family used to refer to rules by number, i.e. "remember to number 8." apparently my stepmother picked it up from another family that she visited. also, number 8 was basically the only one we used. it was cleaning up your own dishes.