The Language of Monkeys

As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve recently started climbing again. While I’m not setting the world on fire with my abilities (not yet anyway), climbing provides a great indoor workout for chilly winter days. Also, I’m fortunate enough to be in a community where there are some amazingly talented climbers to teach me what I’m lacking and provide inspiration. It’s quite remarkable to watch them effortlessly traverse one of the largest fake rock collections I’ve ever seen. One of the greatest challenges, however, is learning the language.

As with most sports, climbing has its own unique vocabulary and learning these foreign terms is one of the hardest tasks. After all, just about anyone can climb, it’s part of our nature (assuming you believe in that wacky theory of evolution). Figuring out the jargon is a whole different challenge.

A conversation among climbers may include any of the following words being used as a noun or verb including crimper, sloper, gaston, pinch, under-cling, jug, lump-o-grapes, flagging, cranking, matching, tracking, campus, getting pumped (followed by de-pumping) and my personal favorite; mailing (okay, it’s actually sending, but that doesn’t seem to make any sense to me so I chose to make up my own term). Also, good beta can make a specific problem a lot easier.

I’ll admit, I don’t know what most of these words mean, at least not in the context of climbing. I’m still not convinced they are even all real. I do know however, that I’m having fun but my skin hurts.