NineMoons talks about: AMF.

WARNING: Strong Language Ahead. [Don't say I didn't warn you.]

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Previously in this series:

NineMoons talks about: CHICKSILOG

NineMoons talks about: ASA

[And then, my god, I started making a regular feature of it! XD This is the third one already!]

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An empirical observation: there is a fairly foolproof way to find out if your Filipino GE buddy played or is still playing Kim Hakkyu's other game Ragnarok Online.

All you need to do is to ask him or her what AMF means.

AMF, often written Amp or Amf and variants thereof, is simply the very shortened form of the Filipino swearword "Ampota". This, in turn, is a contraction of "Ang puta" - literally meaning "The whore / That whore".

"Puta" is the integral insult in what everyone calls the Filipino language's equivalent to "Fuck you": "Putang ina mo", "Your mom's a whore". So, yeah, it's sorta like "Yo' momma", only it's a really bad thing to say in my country because of the strongly family-aspected culture we have here.

When Ragnarok Online hit our shores people swarmed in to live out their fantasies and what-not. Unfortunately, the road to glory was littered with many hazards, each of which called for a curse to properly express the thwarted players' feelings. Many times, saying something REALLY crude, such as the aforementioned "Putang ina mo", was the only way to vent.

And then we all found out that there was a built-in obscenity filter in the game's chat: ALL curses both in English and in Filipino were blanked out of chat windows. Even the word "Bastard" was blanked out, which made people laugh because one of the Swordman's weapon choices was the Bastard Sword - so people couldn't advertise for it whenever they wanted to sell.

People got around the obscenity filter by replacing letters with ASCII, or by shortening the insults; thus, "fuck you" became _|_ or some variation thereof, and "putang ina mo" became "ang puta", which became "amputa" - which finally evolved into "amfota" / "ampota" and "amp" / "amf". [It's just like Pokemon!]

And thus "amf" became the Ragnarok player's all-purpose complaint whenever he or she got stomped by a boss, or got KSed, or failed to upgrade equipment, or found out the in-game significant other was of the wrong gender...... You get the drift.

Next time you pass someone angry and you see them yell "Amf" - give them your sympathies if you're on the same side, or know that you've been successful in ticking them off if you're not.