A bit of history...
In the late 1990s there were a bunch of people who frequented an early retirement forum at The Motley Fool.
Much of the discussion was social and lifestyle, as you see here, but there was also a good bit of discussion around the topic of figuring out just how much you needed to retire early, and avoid the dangers of inflation, volatility, and so forth.
The center of that discussion was a spreadsheet developed by the host of that site (known as Intercst) which used data from Yake prof Robert Schiller and simulated a retirement and subsequent withdrawals, adjusting for inflation to keep spending power constant, for each of the ~130 or so years in our recorded history.
In about 1999, some of the discussions went into talking about the blissful state in which, even if you weren't retired, you were no longer dependent on the earnings of your employment to secure a comfortable retirement -- in other words, you could continue working but know that you could quit any time you pleased, and the decision to continue working was merely a matter of personal choice and convenience, not necessity.
The people in or near this state were interested in very much the same things that the early retirement people talked about, so much so that they were mostly indistinguishable on the forum, and many discussions included some sort of prelude describing this similarity.
I believe it was a member of that forum who went by the name "Wanderer", then living and working in the United Arab Emirates, who pointed out the similarity, and then proposed an acronym "FI/RE", for Financial Independence and/or Retiring Early". It soon shorted to just FIRE. (Wanderer joined this forum soon after it started, but never posted here.)
About the time Wander was proposing that acronym, I was writing a web based program to do what Intercst's spreadsheet did, as I wanted to include multiple streams of income and changing spending requirement, and that seemed to demand a program instead of a spreadsheet. I used his acronym, and called my program Firecalc. Those interested in the calculator project discussed it on the forum at The Motley Fool.
Around the middle of 2000, as I recall, The Motley Fool decided that their forum was so popular that they could make people pay $5/month to read the messages.
I decided not to join for several reasons. But since I had already set up a web hosting account for the calculator, I used that account to start an alternate forum for those who wanted to discuss FIRE issues, but weren't looking for a paid venue for their participation.
OK, that's the origin of this forum, and where FIRE came from.
As for dryer sheets, pets with pancakes on their heads, Jarhead with his wheat bread, and many other inexplicable discussions, well, let's just say our group has developed a distinctive personality, and running gags seem to be one of the symptoms.
