In the third episode of Better Call Saul, a flashback to Jimmy McGill's days as a street hustler introduced us to a phrase we've been desperate to define since: "Chicago sunroof." At the time, all we knew was that it was a maneuver that landed Jimmy in jail and, without his brother Chuck's intervention, would have had him labeled a sex offender. But what is a "Chicago sunroof," we wondered for weeks.

The answer came on Monday in the show's season finale. A "Chicago sunroof," it turns out, is the act of taking a shit in someone's open sunroof. As Jimmy says while hosting Bingo:

"Now, Chet drove... And this will give you an idea of exactly what kind of a douchebag this guy was... Drove a white pearlescent BMW 7 series with white leather interior. [Chuckles] So, I saw that thing, and I had... I'd had a few, like I said. And, uh... I climbed up top, and I may have... Defecated, uh, through the sunroof. Not my finest hour... I'll grant you that. But that's what a Chicago sunroof is. Now you know. [Chuckles] It's a real thing. I didn't make it up. I'm not the first person to do it. There's a name for it."

Simple, elegant, and far less vile than the definitions dreamed up by imaginative 12-year-olds on Urban Dictionary. But defining the term wasn't enough. Esquire needed to know if it was a real phrase, as Jimmy insists in the finale, or if the Better Call Saul writers invented it on their own. So we got co-creator and writer Peter Gould on the phone.

"We made it up," Gould says. "In the writers' room we were talking about Jimmy and his ups and downs. We talked about what he would get arrested for and we had this image of him getting drunk and taking revenge on some enemy by defecating through his sunroof. Because we knew he was living in Cicero, we dubbed it the Chicago sunroof."

And that's the origin of the "Chicago sunroof," a name so treasured that it was a leading contender when it came time to label the plaque outside the show's writers' room.

The real genius of the "Chicago sunroof" lies not so much in its meaning, but in the way the writers made us wait to find out that meaning. In the intervening weeks between the third episode and the finale, the show's fans wildly speculated about the offense. Definitions immediately popped up online, with possibilities including "Placing your penis on the head of a unsuspecting person especially a bears fan in a public place" and "The act of urinating into the open sunroof of a car from the balcony of a building."

"I was stunned by how disgusting and elaborate some of the explanations were," Gould says of the Internet theories. "You can say what you want about our version, but at least it has the virtue of simplicity."

Despite their depravity, the fans who attempted to define "Chicago sunroof" warmed Gould's heart. "It is thrilling that people watch the show so carefully and care enough to run to Urban Dictionary and invent an explanation," he says. Even if that explanation involves farting in someone's face so forcefully that expulsion is "indicative of the Windy City itself."

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