Inside Jokes

I was sitting at a round table with my coworkers, waiting patiently (read: the opposite of patient) for lunch to arrive, and one of my teammates walked up to join our table. I smiled at her and said, “Oh, tuh-low!”

And she said, “What?”

I looked around the table, which was weirdly silent (but in retrospect everyone may have just been too hangry to speak) and I realized I was the subject of eight confused looks.

So, feeling a bit foolish, I tried to explain. During quarantine, my friends and I were playing Scrabble. My roommate, who is not a fan of word games but is a good sport and plays them anyway, was getting exasperated by her letters. About halfway through the game, it was her turn, and she thought long and hard, then emphatically placed a word on the board.

My other friend and I tilted our heads.

“What’s TLO?” I asked?

My roommate stared at me.

I stared at her. Our other friend said, “What were you trying to spell?”

But honestly, I don’t think we ever figured it out. Because we started laughing about the possibilities of using the word TLO, and how it sounds like a local greeting in some small woodsy town. “Oh, tuh-low!”

And that local greeting has since become our usual greeting for each other. So usual, in fact, that I forgot it was not normal and used it with my coworker.

And the background story for that inside joke really isn’t all that great. I mean, I have had the privilege of traveling a lot, and some of my inside jokes have come from wildly unbelievable situations that no one could possibly understand if they weren’t there. Those are some really good stories. But misplaying a word in Scrabble? Really not that great of a story.

But somehow tlo is still meaningful to those friends, a shared experience we all had together that was out of the normal course of life, that we can still laugh about. And it’s gotten me thinking about inside jokes in general. They’re basically just shared experiences that came with a memorable set of positive emotions. And whenever you relive that experience together, you relive those emotions. You get to feel together, and that is a really neat thing.

So, in celebration of feeling together, I would like to know: what are some of your favorite inside jokes? Moments that have lived on for ages in your life because they were that meaningful and funny and can still bring those feelings back?