Idiom
F in the chat
Meaning
condolences, regret, or sympathy.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“I failed my driving test, so F in the chat.”
“My phone screen just shattered into a thousand pieces, so F in the chat.”
“When the team lost the championship in the final seconds, the fans posted an F in the chat to express their collective disappointment.”
Examples
simple
“I failed my driving test, so F in the chat.”
contextual
“My phone screen just shattered into a thousand pieces, so F in the chat.”
complex
“When the team lost the championship in the final seconds, the fans posted an F in the chat to express their collective disappointment.”
Origin
The term originates from a prompt in the PC version of the 2014 video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. During a funeral cutscene for a soldier who died saving the player’s life, the game directs the player to Press F to Pay Respects. This mechanic required the player to press the F key to touch the coffin, an attempt at interactive mourning that was met with immediate and widespread mockery.
The prompt subsequently transitioned into a meme, adopted by streamers on the platform Twitch who would call for their audience to type F in chat windows to express sympathy when an unfortunate event occurred. The instruction to press F to pay respects moved into non-gaming contexts to suggest that credit or recognition is due, typically in response to a minor social failure or a public misfortune.
Key words
Related idioms
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