I’ve been thinking about text based yo-yo descriptions lately and thinking back on McBride’s TFY notation from Yonomicon. TFY was a system to describe every state a yo-yo could be in by using three reference points: Throwhand, Freehand, and Yo-yo.
For example; Brain Twister would be described as “Front Top Single Mount-Bs.YF(3), Forward Twist, Exit”.
In that example you would start with your throwhand and work your way through to the yo-yo at the end of the string. Throwhand and Yo-yo are always assumed at the beginning and end, so the notation for the mount is simply YF (or TYFY if you were showing the beginning and end in the notation, but since those are always there the notation is just YF).
Double or Nothing would be described as FTYF. Again the yo-yo string goes from your Throwhand (assumed), to your Freehand, to your Throwhand again, then to the Yo-Yo (mounted on the string), then to your Freehand, and ending back at the Yo-yo (which again is not in the notation because that position is assumed). So Freehand, Throwhand, Yo-Yo, Freehand.
To be honest, I never fully grokked the notation and I think it became harder to use when tricks started changing planes (flops) or using multiple planes (like a wrist mount). I might be wrong, it might be totally still functional for describing tricks, but videos just ended up doing a better job. If anyone is looking for more info, you can read some of the chapters here on the Wayback Machine or probably find a used copy of the book somewhere. I don’t think YYE has any in stock.
To get to my question though, I’m working on an art project that involves transcribing some of my tricks into text and I thought TFY could be perfect. As I said before, I don’t really understand most of it, so I thought I’d check and see if anyone here could help me describe the following tricks in TFY:
Supposedly McBride is working on a Yonomicon Reissue and @unklesteve was doing the forward. I enjoy the Yonomicon and have read it serval times and refer back to the list of mounts. I can see why its taking Mark a while as Whips, Slacks, and Suicides were morphs not for seen at the time. Since Skin the Gerbil is a series of double on wraps this one cold be transcribe, but what would be the moniker for a whip morph like in branding or to designated a flop? Thank would be something not in the current Yonomicon lexicon. Fun to think about, I’ll have to go back to it to figure out Skin The Gerbil.
Sorry for the bump but I bought this book (original issue) a few months back and I’m just getting started with it and I have to say, after learning tricks and the jargon from YT and the forums, this is quite confusing for a novice such as myself. Is this lingo worth learning or has it essentially died out? Seems like a great book for a solid foundation of yoyoing but something like “YFYT(17)” is really confusing and this is just the very basics at the beginning of the book, so I imagine it get’s much more complex.
So what say you? Is this book worth digging in to learn the lingo? I plan to read it regardless but not too sure if I really want to get the initialisms down if they aren’t universally used and from what I gather, I have never seen anyone use this type of notation, so if I had to guess, I’d say it didn’t really catch on or at least withstand the test of time. I’d like to hear others opinions on this and maybe even see where @DocPop is at with transcribing his tricks 4 years later. I’m a big fan of your tricks and have learned a lot from you already, so I would love to hear your thoughts on this book and how relevant it is in 2025.
I wish I knew there was a revised version of this book before I bought it but it’s cool to own the original press as I’m a collector at heart.
Dude, I’m still unable to understand TFY. It reminds me of learning other languages, which is something else I’ve struggled with. My brain has a hard time grokking the language of TFY, so I never made any progress on it. I’ve always had a ton of respect for it though and I’ve seen some people really get a lot out of it.
Haha, yeah, I think it will still be a good read regardless, however, I’m glad that I’m not the only one that finds it to be a bit confusing. I’m going to try not to get hung up on TFY and enjoy the book for what it is, I’m sure I will still get a ot of of it myself.
