"Bro, do you even lift?"

 I've wanted to do this post for about a decade but just never got around to it. Maybe I didn't want to embarrass myself, but it's just too good of a societal misinterpretation to pass up as the troubles with literalness of figures of speech, idioms, and other dual meaning phrases is on display here.

 
Back in 2004 I was a professional gamer before it paid anything; in other words, I was jobless. However, I was extremely talented at most of the Xbox racing games which were Xbox Live enabled. Truly, this was incomprehensible to me in that I could race other people from around the world and the first game I took serious in becoming #1 in the world was Toca Race Driver 2. The game itself deserves a secondary blog post in all that it's done for me in terms of friends and the ability to have a conversation, but today I pick up the story on any given start at the A1 Ring.

I'm starting first. I need to win this race to maintain my rank of the top racer in the world. I look forward to turn one and its evil steep slope into what I considered the biggest crash inducing turn one in all of racing. Since this is a videogame, many people simply don't care, or aren't skilled enough, to get through turn one cleanly. It was commonplace for 12th place to try and take the lead in turn one by, well, forgetting to slow down for turn one and the end result was primitive graphics showing a bunch of broke race cars and a whole lot of angry voices yelling at each other and it was never anyone's fault, or the other favorite go to excuse was, "I didn't hit anyone on my screen!"

Anyway, in-depth racing talk aside, the common result of such incidents was someone saying, "dude, just lift!" meaning lift off the accelerator. During this same era an early internet meme started popping up with the words sometimes changing order of, "Bro, do you even lift?" This could only have meant one thing, Toca Race Driver 2 had a supreme reach on the internet and the struggle of turn one was real and known by many.

Flash forward to, and I'm almost ashamed to say this, November of last year. Something spurred my curiosity of the Toca game, so I looked up information and then I looked up the meme and I was shocked; its origin wasn't of Toca at all but referring to weightlifting! 17 years of knowledge were instantly thrown into question and another bit of the English language confused me once more.

Non-literal words, phrases, and idioms can be extremely confusing for those on the autism spectrum, and it can be even more confusing when we can actually use the words in something that makes sense. I should've been suspicious of the fact that Toca had such a wide reach in society, but "do you even lift" made sense as turn one of a race looked more like a bowling alley than a racetrack.

I spent almost two decades unaware of my misinterpretation of the saying but since then I haven't been able to shake the words from my thoughts when I see a lap one turn one incident on iRacing. It works, doesn't it? When someone from last goes through the field like a perfect strike in bowling the question to be asked is, "bro! do you even lift?" Surely this makes more sense than anything bodybuilding related, right? 

Right?

Sometimes I like my understanding of words more than the actual meaning, but when the truth does come out, we can be oh so confused and have no idea where you got your understanding because ours makes much more sense.