welcoming you into the fold

Friday, jun. 27, 2008   |   0 comments

You and your respective HR departments will be glad to discover, as I recently did during an impromptu hallway meeting at my internet job, that all a person has to do to make the words “below the fold“ sound racy is to deliver them in a tart mid-Atlantic accent (with optional raised eyebrows).

If you think about it, like I have, non-stop, “above the fold” and “below the fold” are actually the perfect metaphors for the continuum of sexual progress. So much better than the confusing “bases” we had to work with when I was coming up! A “homerun” was always clear enough, especially when it was described as being slid into. “First base” meant…frenching? I think? “Second base” I’m pretty sure was shorthand for going up the girl’s shirt, which was always so lame because there wasn’t really a similarly titillating male equivalent, and what are you supposed to do if the person you’re making out with doesn’t have knockers, skip directly to third? Meanwhile third was a murky thing indeed, signaling acts that varied widely and awkwardly from school to school—for some it meant hot hands-to-parts action, others thought it referred to examinations of the oral persuasion, and there were even those who thought of third as nothing short of full-on pants off dance off…so confusing.

But the tidily binary “above the fold”/“below the fold” (or, even better, the newspaper equivalent: “under the crease”) is so elegant, so straightforward. I say, “How are things going with that ice cream salesperson you’ve been dating?” And you say, “Oh, we’re still strictly above the fold. But we’re going away to Big Sur this weekend, and I’ve already purchased a bottle of tequila, so I imagine we’ll be well below the fold come Saturday morning.” And I know exactly where you and your ice cream salesperson are coming from. Exactly!

Something else I discovered at work recently: “P2P” has almost nothing to do with prostitutes and the payment thereof?