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Muscle terminology and why I hate you
14 years ago
General
Dear muscle fictioners,
I hate you all, and here's why:
1) God damn it, the word that is short for "pectorals" is "pecs." It is not "pecks." Peck is what a bird does. Unless you are an ostrich, stop talking about your huge pecks. Or I will stab you. Stab you in your stupid pecks.
2) Six-packs do not increase in number when you get stronger. That is just moronic. The rectus abdominis, the muscle that makes up the "abs," is one solid muscle that has natural divisions in it that give the appearance of separate muscles. There is one vertical division and four horizontal divisions, like this:
_ _
_|_
_|_
_|_<--bellybutton goes in there!
\ /
As you can see, the vertical division usually does not extend much beyond the top and bottom horizontal divisions. If someone is really lean and developed, you can see six separate bulges in the abdominal muscle. The bottom part of muscle has only a minor division, and will always look like one muscle. SOMETIMES the top part of the muscle will also appear to be divided, creating the rarer "eight-pack." Sometimes you'll also see cases in which the abdominal muscles are asymmetrical, with one side looking higher than the other. But what causes these variations has nothing to do with low body fat or lean muscle mass. It is entirely controlled by GENETICS.
So when you talk about building up muscle so much that "his six-pack became an eight-pack, and then a ten-pack!" you are talking about genetic mutation. It makes about as much sense as saying "he grew another row of abs alongside the first row!" God. AWFUL. I HATE YOU.
In one spectacular example of combining these two terrible things into one, someone I read actually thought the "pack" from a six-pack was the PECS. So yes. His CHEST went from a six-pack to an eight-pack to a ten-pack to a twelve-pack and then to a whole barrel keg, and then I lost the ability to become aroused for all time, ever. If you want to know why there's been no more Contraindications in so long, it is that guy's fault. I blame him.
3) Believe it or not, there is NO SUCH THING AS A BICEP. I know. Seriously. There is no such thing. The muscle, even when it is on one arm, is called a biceps. Biceps (short for biceps brachii) is from the Latin for "two-headed." When your biceps are all beefy and lean (like mine, you jealous fuckers), you can actually see the split down the muscle. There's also a biceps femoris, which is that muscle on the back of your thigh, but no one ever means that. What I'm getting at here is that it is always wrong to say "he flexed a bicep." That sounds stupid. It's like saying, "he cut the paper with some scissor," or "he was in underwear because his pant was in the laundry." And yet EVERYONE does that. You do it so much you've gotten me doing it sometimes by accident and for that I HATE YOU WITH DEMONIC FURY FROM BEYOND THE FAR REACHES OF HELL. While we're on the topic, there is no such thing as a tricep or a quadrucep, either. Unless you have some kind of sad and grotesque medical condition, I guess.
...
Okay, look, obviously I'm kidding you here in tone (I don't hate you, I promise), but seriously: if you're gonna write muscle stuff in fiction, you should know at least some of your shit. Otherwise you end up sounding like a dork.
I hate you all, and here's why:
1) God damn it, the word that is short for "pectorals" is "pecs." It is not "pecks." Peck is what a bird does. Unless you are an ostrich, stop talking about your huge pecks. Or I will stab you. Stab you in your stupid pecks.
2) Six-packs do not increase in number when you get stronger. That is just moronic. The rectus abdominis, the muscle that makes up the "abs," is one solid muscle that has natural divisions in it that give the appearance of separate muscles. There is one vertical division and four horizontal divisions, like this:
_ _
_|_
_|_
_|_<--bellybutton goes in there!
\ /
As you can see, the vertical division usually does not extend much beyond the top and bottom horizontal divisions. If someone is really lean and developed, you can see six separate bulges in the abdominal muscle. The bottom part of muscle has only a minor division, and will always look like one muscle. SOMETIMES the top part of the muscle will also appear to be divided, creating the rarer "eight-pack." Sometimes you'll also see cases in which the abdominal muscles are asymmetrical, with one side looking higher than the other. But what causes these variations has nothing to do with low body fat or lean muscle mass. It is entirely controlled by GENETICS.
So when you talk about building up muscle so much that "his six-pack became an eight-pack, and then a ten-pack!" you are talking about genetic mutation. It makes about as much sense as saying "he grew another row of abs alongside the first row!" God. AWFUL. I HATE YOU.
In one spectacular example of combining these two terrible things into one, someone I read actually thought the "pack" from a six-pack was the PECS. So yes. His CHEST went from a six-pack to an eight-pack to a ten-pack to a twelve-pack and then to a whole barrel keg, and then I lost the ability to become aroused for all time, ever. If you want to know why there's been no more Contraindications in so long, it is that guy's fault. I blame him.
3) Believe it or not, there is NO SUCH THING AS A BICEP. I know. Seriously. There is no such thing. The muscle, even when it is on one arm, is called a biceps. Biceps (short for biceps brachii) is from the Latin for "two-headed." When your biceps are all beefy and lean (like mine, you jealous fuckers), you can actually see the split down the muscle. There's also a biceps femoris, which is that muscle on the back of your thigh, but no one ever means that. What I'm getting at here is that it is always wrong to say "he flexed a bicep." That sounds stupid. It's like saying, "he cut the paper with some scissor," or "he was in underwear because his pant was in the laundry." And yet EVERYONE does that. You do it so much you've gotten me doing it sometimes by accident and for that I HATE YOU WITH DEMONIC FURY FROM BEYOND THE FAR REACHES OF HELL. While we're on the topic, there is no such thing as a tricep or a quadrucep, either. Unless you have some kind of sad and grotesque medical condition, I guess.
...
Okay, look, obviously I'm kidding you here in tone (I don't hate you, I promise), but seriously: if you're gonna write muscle stuff in fiction, you should know at least some of your shit. Otherwise you end up sounding like a dork.
"Don't need 'em! They call me Double-A: ALL ABS!"
Jokes aside, you are correct that things can get a little silly and sometimes completely incorrect, but we're already talking about growing so much muscle that the person's bone mass has to increase just to support it all. Sometimes without the ingestion of a proper amount of mass beforehand. Sometimes things just get silly.
I shall have to remember this from now on. ^^
( gotta admit I once let a "bicep" slip trhough, though"
Column. Rows are horizontal, columns are vertical.
...Of course, I kid in my pedantry. :P
But as a fellow wordsmith, I hear you. What drives me mad is the shortening of Biceps to 'bis' as in: "BBL Off to work the bi's bro"