You might hate this, but it has to do with English grammar. BO-RING. Right? Wrong. That first conceptualization (above) did something extraordinarily rare in English grammar. Unfortunately, though, that rarity is the main reason why people had so much trouble understanding the term in the first place.
Here’s the deal.
If you spent any time around linguists, you’d hear them refer to either grammars, or a grammar. That’s because there is more than just one kind of grammar. The grammar we all learned in school is called formal grammar or what people sometimes call formalistic grammar. It’s the kind that uppity types get all bent out of shape about. Like that sentence there! It ended with a preposition! OH MY FUCKING GOD, CALL THE POLICE.
In Cognitive Linguistics, we take into account psychology, brain function, the artificial construct of the human mind, and human embodiment relative to human language.
What all that means is that the crap they taught you in school was just some shit somebody made up. It’s the result you get if you sit around with a broomstick up your ass and get so angry that you suddenly feel the urge to tell other people that they’re stupid because they speak differently. That’s all. Cognitive Linguistics look at language in a much bigger context.
The important thing for you to know here is that formalistic grammar would have you believe that the term farside is most typically an adjective or adverb (it can be a few other things, but I’m not gonna worry about them because they don’t matter here).
Here’s two sentences with farside identified according to formalistic grammar:
As an adjective: Dave did a farside soul.
As an adverb: Dave farside souled the rail.
The thing is, formalistic grammar can tell one from the other, but it really can’t tell you much else — why a term died, for instance.
Now get a load of this: in Cognitive Linguistics, both of those usages are better identified as a preposition. A preposition is any word that relates one object to another object in three-dimensional space. Imagine a squirrel and a tree. You could say that the squirrel:
went around the tree,
went to the tree,
jumped over the tree,
sat in the tree,
dug under the tree, and so on.
If we understand the term farside as being prepositional, we get a much better idea of how it functions and the purposes it serves in rollerblading discourse.
For instance, when you hear that the squirrel went around the tree, you get a very basic kind of picture in your head. You probably imagine something like a top view of a tree with a squirrel and dotted line that shows his path to it, then around it, then continuing on. Something like that.
If I asked you to imagine someone doing a farside soul (or a topside soul) on a rail, you would probably get a very similar kind of picture in your head. Some dude (yourself, maybe) skated up to a rail, jumped either hip-first or butt-first towards it, then locked on in soul position and continued on down the rail.
However you imagine it, your brain is putting together something called a schematization. This is a very basic kind of mental picture that includes only the most relevant information to the scenario you’re imagining. For the soul grind scenario, your brain includes the skater, the skates, a rail, left/right orientation, probably up/down orientation (gravity) and the skater’s feet-based orientation to the rail. That’s a shitload of information for a preposition to encode, but your brain can handle it no problem because you’re a rollerblader.
So, we know that the kind of mental picture your brain puts together for a prepositional scene is highly schematic — which is to say that you imagine the entire sequence as a scenario, or, if you like, as a very basic kind of story. You’re brain leaves out all irrelevant information like the brand of skates, the color of the soul frames, the kind of outfit, the season, whether or not it’s raining, etc.
Now, here’s what’s remarkable about that. Back when farside was part of our normal or everyday usage, it worked in cooperation with the term topside to designate the shape of the rail. Farside for round rails, topside for square stuff. Virtually no other preposition in English specifies what linguists call “geon shape.”
For instance, suppose I say the following:
Dave walked through a parking lot.
In that sentence, the preposition is through. To you, me, and just about everybody else who speaks English, through means that you went into some kind of area or place (abstract in shape), you went inside of it for some amount of time, and then you went out again. But NEVER NEVER NEVER in English does a preposition tell you precisely the shape of the noun that follows the preposition.
Like this:
Dave walked through a (triangle-shaped) parking lot.
Or this:
Dave walked through a (square-shaped) parking lot.
In these two cases you know the shape of the parking lot because you had extra words (in parentheses) to provide that information. With farside, you didn’t need that. You knew the rail was round because farside told you that. If the rail were square, you would have used topside.
No other preposition in English specifies the shape of an object with this level of precision.
If you think about it, it’s really an incredible feat.
See, rollerbladers not only see the world differently, we value certain things more than others because they’re more important to us. And our language is a reflection of our values.
Hell, handrail shape probably matters more to us than it does for the Americans with Disabilities Association (they’re why every staircase has a railing in this country). I think it would be safe to say that they, too, place a high level of value on handrails. Either way, rails are more important to us because we do cooler shit.
So the point is this: we make our own language to suit our own purpose. We make it the way we want it, and make it mean what we damn well want it to mean.
The trouble is, rollerblading language is vastly in debt to grammar and usage that we’re already familiar with. When we invented the term farside, it wasn’t just a new word — it was a whole new way to think.
Personally, I think we lost something quite valuable when we traded it in for the generic, all-purpose, family friendly topside.
But who knows? 80mm wheels came back. Maybe farside will come back some day, too.
Thanks for reading.
interesting take. While I thought it designated rail shape, I always thought farside meant coming off the rail on the farside as you land. Where as in topside you would come off the rail the same side you approached it.
Thanks for reading, man. And yeah, I’ve heard that take, but only pretty recently. I might see if I can track down anything on where that interpretation comes from. Any idea where you first heard it used like that?
Really cool stuff, Frank! I couldn’t help but start thinking the same way as ballog. Mostly in relation to square rails, as they have both a topside and a farside. You could even go deeper with that and dive into darkside tricks.
Thanks, Geoff! You’re definitely right about square rails having both a topside AND a farside (assuming you lock the right way each time) but don’t forget that a square rail also has a near side. Supposing that you’ve got a square rail down the middle of a staircase, you could do a soul, a topsoul or a farside soul. If you’re dealing with a round rail in the same situation, you’ve only got two sides to work with instead of three. If you want to get tech about the angle the soul foot sits at, then you’d be in line with that second conceptualization I mentioned in the first part of the article. As for darksides, that’s definitely a topic I’m looking into writing a piece about. Thanks for reading, man!
Now what about a square rail Frank using the term farside how would that work ?
Hey Jarrod, thanks for reading dude! Concerning farsides on square rails, I completely agree with what you’re implying and what Geoff said above. Using farside for that stance on a square rail makes perfect sense to me. But for my money, doing a farside on a square rail rail just wasn’t part of the original debate back in the day. One thing that I would add though, would be that there wasn’t a specially encoded term for that use of farside. In other words, if you were skating a square rail and locked on the way you and Geoff are talking about it, it would seem like a crazier trick and you’d probably want credit for the extra difficulty. In that case, my guess would be that you’d probably just come out and SAY that your trick was farside on a square rail. Doing that would make the language used to describe the trick a little bit more cumbersome. The thing I can’t figure is this new (or new to me usage) that deals with where you land. No other trick name–frontside anything or backside anything–specifies where you land. I’d be interested to hear if that interpretation holds for backside royals, say, or frontside nugens. Another thing I’d further add is that it’s kinda rare to describe a trick without first describing the rail–I mean in terms of normal conversation. If it’s an established rail or spot that everyone knows about, you’d already be familiar with the rail being reported on.
Thought provoking. Shredded!
Now I was under the impression that far sides and dark sides could only be done on a square rail or shotgun box ect and if it was a round rail that it was either a soul or top soul. Because when grinding a round rail you right on top of it and if you lean to far to the negative side to just slip off. I think when talking about a square rail the term far side will always apply.
Thanks Rob! I can’t wait to see your section in Dag Days! @Bryan, I think you’re exactly right about the modern usage of “farside” and “topside”. But be careful though because a lot of our terms have changed their meanings over the years. Thanks for the comments you guys.
jesus so boring and pretentious
It’s fair to say this is boring if it isn’t your cup of tea, but I don’t see how you could consider this pretentious in any way.
@bballog If you actually topside, you will always come off on the same side. If you just farside, you will always come off on the farside of the rail.
I always remember it was just a respect thing, where if you just did a farside it was lame, you weren’t tweeking it over and doing it right, you were half ass’ing it. I remember there being debates about whether you could actually do a topside on a rail or not, or if it always had to be on a ledge.
I still use the term “farside” all the time. The curse of the OG. All the kids assume you’re senile.
As far as I remember, farside was primarily used to describe approach when the term started. For some context though, when I started skating, grinding didn’t exist. The closest we had were quarter (1/4) stalls/rolls in which you would turn a multiple of 90º and land with one foot on the deck and one foot on the top of the transition.
When soul tricks first started showing up farside became a useful term to differentiate approach but it wasn’t competing with topside as a descriptor because topsides weren’t invented yet. The back and forth debate about what is and is not a true “topside” or “topsoul” was soon to follow once they were invented and I think Frank is right on describing how that went.
I’d add that there was a lot shit talking about whether your wheels on your soul foot were touching when doing a topside trick and if that meant that it “didn’t count”. And for that matter, there was debate to whether a trick “counted” or not if you didn’t grab it which is pretty common not to do these days.
Cool article, Frank. Have you written about Royale vs Shifty vs Shifty Royale?
Probably the most boring article about rollerblading I’ve ever read. No wonder everyone thinks rollerbladers are faggots.
Thanks for reading Alan, Morgan, and Jesse!
@Alan: Cheers man!
@Morgan: Keep using it! Please!
@Jesse: Thanks for all of that. I really appreciate it. I might take up the Royale/Shifty thing at some point, and when I do, I’ll probably need to get in touch with you about it.
Any other OG’s out there want to suggest a topic, shoot me an email.
Anybody else, same thing!
Thanks so much for reading, yall!
Nice tackle: it’s still farside in my book. This comes up every time I use the term and kids don’t know what I’m talking about.
haha – thanks, Billy!
It’s become clear to me skating with some younger guys lately that there are definitely two dialects currently circulating in rollerblading. I often find myself code-switching between the dialects while interacting with guys who use a significantly different set of terms for things. The nice thing I’ve found is that a lot of them have been reciprocating and they’re translating back to me frequently. To me it’s win/win. No need to strong arm one way of thinking. In fact, I think balancing more than one way of thinking is what’s keeping the “jock” attitudes OUT of rollerblading in the first place. Thanks for the comment, Billy. I hope you’ll stick with the blog as I continue to earn my sea legs with it!
Also, sidewalks are next on the creativity chopping block (to the extent grinding can still be innovated). Negatives have been pretty sexy for a while — to think they were once equally maligned.
Spin-to-win sidewalk? Can’t wait.
To me, farside could be done on any object, the difference between topside or farside was the position of the frame on the object (or how far the ankle is bent).
What i used to reffer to as farside, is nowadays named as “darkside”.
Please bring back farside….
Hey Ths, your take on farside was covered in the article (though briefly)… and a whole lot of people share (and shared back in the day) your take on that one. Darkside gets into some very tricky linguistic and conceptual things, and I’m planning on addressing it here pretty soon. Thanks for your comment, man!
Acid walks were cooler than sidewalks, especially an alleyoop acid walk. Also, on a rail if the person is standing straight up, there’s no way it should be called a top side in my opinion.
Yeah, on a square rail it’s possible to do both a farside, and a topside soul… those would definitely be two different tricks.
What about doing a farside on a hubba/ledge. I get where you were going but there def is a farside.
Thank you for such a scholarly view of a dead term in an activity I love to do that you somehow made seem as exciting as reading a phone book.
Hey Frank,
Great piece, but i definitely agree with those who are pointing out that far side applied to a lot of objects, square and round. In fact one of the first far side sessions we had was a ledge at Venice beach. I think it’s in some movies? Arlo laced it. For a very long time top side was only really used around transitions as no one had managed to get them down on flat-to-flat street. Fry & julio pioneered the street top side world…
As for the side walks Jon has to take the wrap for them… And wheel barrows! How did such a lovely & talented guy invent the 2 worst moves in skating? 😉 (Love you Jon)
Hey Brooke!
Thanks for weighing in on this. I should say that it was never my intention to suggest that only one interpretation of the term (farside) existed or should exist, either in the past, or at any time since. All rollerblading terms–just like the non-jargon language used in everyday talk–is constantly in flux. People make meaning based on prior knowledge, standard-ish syntactical constructions, and novel syntactical constructions. One of the many meanings that farside seemed to contain for a while was the idea that the term differentiated between square and round grinding surfaces–which is something that English prepositions almost NEVER do. From a linguistic perspective, this provided me with a fascinating challenge that I hoped to open my blog with in the hopes that people would take an interest. It seems to have worked, now I just need to find other examples that will keep people as interested as this topic has! Thanks again for your comment, Brooke. It’s great having you contribute to my posts here because you were actually present for so many of the topics this blog addresses! Be well, man!
According to what you say, sidewalks coud be considered as real tricks for this guy as he can hold each foot in a position that is sustainable independently.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=722741554509282&pnref=story
It exactly is a one-footed grind on the laces of is boot. 😉
