Whenever we watch a movie or TV show that features the military, we hear soldiers asking each other "What's your 20?" Through the application of context clues, we have ascertained that this is simply a way of saying "Where are you?" But we've never understood why "20" means location--we even asked a veteran, and he was unable to shine any light. We considered passing the question along to the Research Department, but she's off gallivanting somewhere in the American Southwest. So, we had to do the job ourselves.
After an exhaustive and, frankly, impressive feat of investigation--consisting of a Google search of "What's your 20?" followed by a click to urbandictionary.com--we found out the origin of the phrase is CB-slang. CB-slang features a number of "10-codes"--shorthand for common expressions. The most familiar is probably "10-4": OK. "10-20" is shorthand for, "What's your location," which has subsequently been adopted as "What's your 20?"
Of course, why people--particularly soldiers who may be in the heat of battle and thus presumably desirous of maximum speed--prefer "What's your 20?" to the syllable-saving "Where are you?" remains a mystery.
By the way, if you've never checked out Urban Dictionary, it's quite a hoot. It's like Wikipedia for slang. People contribute their own slang terms and/or slang definitions of everyday words and names. Thus, according to Urban Dictionary, the definitions assigned to the name of the primary author of "The Solipsist" include, "A very VERY sexy person" and "Something you would/should name your penis." Sounds about right. What really convinced us of Urban Dictionary's value, though, was the definition of "solipsist":
"(noun)-a person who believes he/she is the center of the universe.
"See also: cockbunny"
Just for the record: the "10" codes, like the spelling out of the alphabet with words (i.e. Alpha, bravo, charlie, etc.) were designed for clarity. Radio/phone communications were (ARE for that matter) sometimes not of the most crystal clarity; people have an annoying habit of speaking with, sometimes strange accents ( Yes, ah mins yew!) And there has been known to be some other annoying distractions like, oh, ah dunno, BOMBS! So, when, say, calling for OTHER bombs to be dropped on those pests dropping bombs on you, it was felt that clarity might be better than speed. It MAY be the only GOOD idea the military ever had... except for.. nope, thst's it
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