Community terms

• Beat Boys: Big Shots, named for a classic video
• Hallway map: A map shaped like a narrow line, like Hammerhead Bridge.
• Paint: Despite Splatoon being a game about inkfish spraying ink, the community has almost unanimously decided to refer to the substance they spew as paint.
• Pity Clam: The Power Clam your Clam Blitz team gets after your barrier is broken.
• Pure: When all 4 abilities on a piece of gear match.
• Salty: Being a sore loser.
• Sharking: Camping in ink.
• Smurf: An alt account made by a high-level player.
• Squidbagging: Rapidly tapping ZL as a taunt.
• Squid Party (or Octo Party, Cephaloparty): Dicking around instead of actually playing the game. Pretty fun to do when you have a disconnect, though.
• Tetris map: A map shaped like an S or a Z, like Mahi-Mahi Resort.
• Vanilla (or V): A weapon’s default variant. I haven’t written down every single term that happens to be multiplayer game parlance, just ones particularly relevant or unique to Splatoon. If there’s anything missing that you’re stumped by, e-mail me and I can try to figure it out!

My own terms

My partners and I have come up with some pretty fucking stupid terms. I share them here in case you care to add them to your own vocabulary.

• Ball: The Grizzco gachapon.
• Bubbly SODA!: Placing a SODA! inside of a Big Bubbler
• Disrespect SODA!: Placing a SODA! less than 5 seconds before the match ends – pointless, but disrespectful
• SODA!: Tacticooler, named for Joe Biden saying SODA!
• SQUI SQUA: Squid Squad, named for their cry at the start of Splattack
• War crimes: See Turf War Crimes, below.

Salmon Run

It was pretty fucking hard for me to memorize all of the names of these assholes.

• Car: Scrapper
• Eel Meal: Being targeted by a Steel Eel
• Fuckfish: Flyfish, named for the Fuckfish theme song
• Onion: Steelheads, named for their onion-shaped bombs
• Stinger: Stringer, pretty much interchangeably, because it’s too fucking hard to remember what it’s actually called

Turf War Crimes

Just as there are crimes in real war, there are crimes in Turf War, the hot new war-themed sport sweeping the nation.

After much study in the field, I have proposed that some of these crimes are thus:

• Using a special weapon on someone's superjump point
• Using a special weapon on someone's Zipcaster return point
• Using all of your Tenta Missiles on one person
• Using Kraken on the tower in Tower Control
• Using E-liter 4K, at all
• Running enough Ink Saver (Sub) pures to throw 2 Splat Bombs before refilling
• Running Gold Aerospray with Special Charge Up pures
• Spawncamping on Hammerhead Bridge, or other stages without spawn flank routes

Some may argue that these crimes are merely called “winning”. But as we all know, nothing is a crime if the cops don’t see you, and the Splatlands are mercifully cop-free, so go ahead and keep doing your war crimes… for now.