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Reader question: Please explain this headline: “Diego Costa is sitting in the nosebleeds with fans.” What does “nosebleeds” mean? My comments: Diego Costa, a soccer player from Spain who currently plays for English Premier League club Chelsea, is seen watching the game with fans high up in the stands. High up in the stands. That's where he's sitting. That's what “nosebleeds” means – those seats are high up in the stands (and far away from the playing field). That “nosebleed” stands for high, as in high altitude, comes from the American folk notion that people tend to nosebleed, shed blood from the nose at high altitudes – ostensibly due to lower barometric pressure, i.e. thinner air. Hence, when people pejoratively – often jovially, too – refer to their seats high up the stands as nosebleeds, they usually just want to point out that their seats are bad, far from action, so far from the action that they cannot see anything without binoculars. Understandably, those seats are the cheapest also. Anyways, those are known as nosebleed seats or, simply, nosebleeds. At least they're known thus to die hard fans (in North America, United States and Canada), who sometimes can only afford the cheapest seats high up there, amongst the clouds presumably, risking a bloody nose in consequence in order to watch their team play. According to Wikipedia, the expression's origin “may have been the 1970s television series Happy Days.” At least the show may have helped to popularize it. | 
