Lexicon ·
field report
noun, abbreviated FR in a post's subject line
- Stated meaning
- A posted account of a night out spent approaching strangers, written for other members of a forum to critique.
- Operating meaning
- An evening rewritten as a document for readers who were not there, so that it can be corrected after it is over.
- Origin
- Pickup vocabulary, in use on the seduction newsgroup alt.seduction.fast from the first month of its surviving archive, June 2003, for a genre its students date to the 1990s.
The genre is older than its archive. The surviving record of alt.seduction.fast (opens in a new window) begins in June 2003, and the term is in use that month. By August a poster was opening one in the standard form: “I’m posting a field report as I’m doing extensive field work with the Blonde Hair and Elvis Openers and could use some discussion on this.”
In 2016 two linguists (opens in a new window) studied 37 of them, 24,000 words from English-language forums. They found the format “surprisingly intact” since the 1990s, “a sort of post-flight debriefing with room for comments and corrections,” still posted to the same kind of old-fashioned message board. One forum headed its board for them “Brag about your success and analyse your failures.” Because every report is open to comment, the authors observed, readers expect “the great level of detail provided in each report.”
Under load, the report converts an evening into evidence. The writer chooses what is recorded, readers who were not present rule on it, and the other person appears only as described. The detail is there so the critique has something to hold, and the critique arrives after nothing can be changed. This site files one for every evening on record, in the same format, at the same level of detail. The comment section is the one part of the genre it left out.