Do You Know What “BASE” Jumping Stands for?

When I was younger I wanted to go skydiving.  I am glad I never got the chance because I'm pretty sure I just liked "saying" I wanted to go skydiving to drive my mom nuts.

There's no way I could have handled that jump.  You ever drive over a hill a bit too fast and the drop puts your stomach into your throat?  I'm guessing this would be much worse.

BASE jumping is something I never understood.  The opportunity to crash through an office window while you're floating from a 10 story building never appealed to me.

I learned a couple things from this video below.

Apparently the "BASE" in "BASE Jumpers" is an acronym.  It stands for "building antenna, span, and Earth...which of course are the many things people jump off of in order to get a thrill or just make young girls say "oh my gawd, oh my gawd" over and over as you'll see in this video.

I also learned that BASE jumping is foreign born.  Or at least I'm guessing that BASE jumping was invented in another country because we don't call bridges "spans" in America.  Either that...or they didn't want the acronym to be called BABE Jumping, which means something completely different. They then went to thesaurus.com and typed in bridge.

They couldn't call it an "overpass", "catwalk", "viaduct" or "extention" so they called it a "span" so BASE would sound good.