Obscure terms

So I really like Facebook. It keeps me in contact with my cousins, friends I've met from far away places, and I can stalk my little sister and make sure she's staying out of trouble. It's especially nice now because I moved away from everyone I know, so I can easily contact my friends if I need to. But one thing I've noticed is people are always using the term "t-minus" and I was starting to wonder what it actually meant. I mean, I know what it means, but what the definition is and where it came from because it's kind of random. So it started to bug me because I'm sure they don't know what it stands for, they're just using it. Kinda like when people say they're "board" instead of "bored", or someone's an "angle" instead of an "angel", or just misspell a word even though spellcheck is built in now. Ignorance pisses me off.


So I started a search for it. I'm pretty familiar with military terms... unless it's a Tom Clancy book and then I'm good for a couple chapters before my weak memory starts to crumble. Then I just try to read the book without fulling knowing the acronyms but I give up after a few chapters, because despite the great story line, I'm not great with acronyms. Those books would be great if they had an acronym dictionary in the back. So I wasn't sure if it was a military term or not.


I started to think about it and my best guess is that T stands for time, but I wanted to make sure. Sure enough, it did. The website I was using (surprisingly urbandictionary.com actually pulled through for me this time) said it was used as a term of how much time was left before a rocket launched. So I guess some of my friends consider their life as exciting as a rocket launch. I beg to differ, I've seen their life, but whatever. So then I started thinking about it, and maybeI'm the ignorant one because it seems everyone knows this and I'm the only idiot who didn't. I hate when that happens.