We all have to start somewhere.

And before I can write anything even remotely worth reading I’m going to fill up the empty (though kind of funny) void in this blog with something that had bothered me for ages until just about last month. Namely, what does FTW mean?

For a while I ignored it; it could have been a random mashing of letters such as qhuifzx or FLKSAYGS?!?#1@. Eventually it became all too clear that it stood for something. Something popular enough to get its own standard initials like LMAO or AFK or even the infamous IMH (which IMH I kind of hate to the point of making that previous kind of a lie). But what was that something? I couldn’t just ask. I didn’t want to look it up because it felt like one of the dumbest things I could look up despite the fact that I’ve looked up lyrics to the song Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World approximately 20+ times now because I can’t for the life of me hear or remember the verses properly… That and it really just never came up in my head. (It wasn’t that pressing an issue. Ever.)

So I guessed what it could be. For maybe a good two, heck, maybe even three years I was fully convinced that FTW just had to be a more extreme variation of WTF. As in something is so WTF it is just flat out FTW. Which sounded out in my head as “Fuh-tha-wha?!?”. For everything I saw it in it fit and made sense, although sometimes a bit more loose than other times. It was the internet, I was highly doubtful of anyone ever being faulted on improper grammatical usage of a blurb like FTW.

Then one day everything changed. Really one second everything changed if you have to get anal about it. I read FTW in a parody of a game show context. Quickly I reread the joke about five times while a nagging sensation that I get whenever I’m wrong (quite rare, no really… really… shut up) kept eating away at my brain until I finally accepted the truth with an almighty,

“Oh.”

So, for the record. Just in case there’s one other person out there as pathetic at the internet as I am:

FTW = For the win

Hey, if this is the start? It can only get better from here.