Also the "box" vs "container" argument is this ridiculous AF thing. Maybe
@Hacker15e can correct here if I'm wrong, but cliffs notes (of my understanding anyway) is that the AF began becoming PC in the 1970's/1980's like the other services, and some creative young fighter pilots created a new language that mocked the PC. Things like "container" vs "box" because the latter could be construed as sexually offensive. Or "head/heading" vs "cranium" or "skull". They also coined "sts", or "so to speak", as a version of "with all due respect", i.e. you can say anything after such a disclaimer (or I guess the reverse in this case, which would be something vaguely suggestive, followed by "sts"). But the main point is that 10-20 years later up to and including now, the whole thing had lost its irony, because young Lt's didn't know the background, they just thought it was how they were supposed to talk. And to the rest of us, they all sound like sheltered Mormon viper pilot dumb asses. Is that about right Hacker?
The popular lore is that it originated with guys in Vietnam as just a typical locker-room-jock innuendo game.
The AF fighter world is tied up in knots over correct comm as a matter of professional culture, so the game was that you could only use the word "head" relating to an activity with a round-eye female in the previous 69 hours, or "box" if you'd had contact with such a body part of a round-eyed female in the previous 69 hours. If one used the terms without having earned the privilege, they were required to pay a fine to the squadron bar fund (the origin of the term "bar fine" if you've ever been to a juicy bar in the PI or Thailand or Korea, BTW).
So, the general prohibition on those words (after all, how many GIs were actually seeing American women regularly while on a combat deployment to SEA?) required the mutation of regular day-to-day speech. It spawned words like "skulling" (because you can't say "head"ing) or "overcranium", and a long other list of funny words to avoid paying a bar fine.
As with any apocryphal origin stories, who knows how true it is. I heard it from Ed Rasimus when I was a ROTC cadet around 1992 or so, so that's as close to being handed down from Mt Olympus as it gets in my book, but Ed could have been pulling my leg as pilots are known to do.
Dunno about "STS", but it was part of the culture when I got there in the late 90s. Basically a version of the "that's what she said" game, where if you can catch someone else saying something that can be distorted to sound like innuendo or a double entendre, you can make a room laugh with adding "STS" at the end. Many of the best STS gameplayers in my squadrons were the women, so it wasn't just guys engaging in the jocularity.
As a side note, I may have mentioned before that a certain famous first-female-Thunderbird pilot used to be a world-class fan of the cursey words. We used to have bingo cards when she would give briefings or academics to see how many different uses of the f-word she would work into it. I seem to remember there being a "5 f-words in a single sentence" spot that spawned quite a lot of laughter once. It is kind of too bad she became more polished after her T-birds tour and lost much of the colorful vocabulary, but she was a great fighter pilot, squadronmate, and friend.
Games people play to keep themselves entertained in a highly stressful, highly competitive work culture.
