Fanspeak is made up ofacronyms, blended words, obscure in-jokes,puns, coinages from science fiction novels or films, and archaic or standard English words used in specific ways relevant or amusing to the science fiction community.
gafiate (verb), an acronym for "getting away from it all" (i.e., leaving fandom, temporarily or permanently)
fafiate (verb), an acronym for "forced away from it all" (i.e., being forced to leave fandom for personal or professional reasons)
A few fannish terms have become standard English, such asfanzine, short for "fan magazine", coined byRuss Chauvenet in 1940, which swiftly replaced the older termfanmag.
Conversely, some fannish terms have been made obsolete by changes in technology (the decline of themimeograph has doomedcorflu for "correction fluid"), cultural changes (afemmefan [female fan] is no longer unusual) or the mere passage of time (slan shack for "a house where a bunch of fans live together" has faded, since fewer young fans have readSlan byA. E. van Vogt).Slan also produced one of the most common fan idioms: "Fans areslans". Fanspeak is so interwoven into the fabric of fandom that it is difficult to discuss fandom without resorting to fannish terms such asfanac "fannish activity" orfilk music (originally a typo for "folk music").
Like other forms of jargon, fanspeak serves as a means of inclusion and exclusion within the fannish community. In the 1970s, the use of traditional fanspeak separated thefanzine andconvention-attending subcommunity (sometimes distinguished astrufen or "true fans") from fans of science fiction movies and television shows (mediafen). The division of the community into trufen and others is rejected by many fans as inherently unfannish.[1]
Today, subsets of fanspeak define subcommunities within fandom. For example,ringers for "fans ofThe Lord of the Rings" is used primarily by fans of thePeter Jackson films (see alsoTolkien fandom).
Fancyclopedia IIIArchived 2021-07-27 at theWayback Machine, a wiki incorporating the first two Fancyclopedias and supplemented by other sources and ongoing contributions, led by Jim Caughran (though 2010), Mark Olson. Jack Weaver and Joe Siclari
