fanspeak n.

Fanspeak.

Fanspeak. The language, typography, and cliches of fandom. Term is derived from ‘newspeak’, the language of the future, in George Orwell’s 1984.

Words become progressively improper from seven phonemes on down:…. Three-letter words are either vulgar or quarrelsome, or both; two-letter words are obscene and one-letter words insane…. We could do a lot worse than introduce a system like that into Fanspeak.

In forty years of talking to each other, science fiction fans have evolved a jargon of their own, sometimes called ‘fanspeak’.

A small club in Poughkeepsie can probably boast as many members as all fandom had in 1938. Creating fan lore in those days meant only telling a dozen or two people, and fan speak had only to be picked up by two or three prominent fan faces to seem to be used everywhere.

The need has arisen for a fanspeak term which means ‘strangers we ignore at conventions’.

Even with the glossary, some of the essays are so full of fanspeak that they are difficult to read.

Fan is more accurate, I suppose, but it spends too much time hanging around the sports page and ESPN, and anyway, the word (even with its fanspeak plural, fen) is a clipped form of the pejorative fanatic, with all its connotations of narrowness, intolerance, unreason, a condemnatory fervor.