Mia McDavid wrote: > > David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > >> Huh; for me, "fan" means somebody involved in fandom. The term >> "reader" was the traditional term for, well, readers, who weren't >> involved in fandom. The appearance of significant tv and film sf has >> caused that to not really be the right term, and so people are trying >> to fall back on "fan" and this is causing all sorts of confusion and >> bad feelings on both sides. >> >> > Silly. Those other guys are fans, we are fen. No, I don't know why > we aren't in fendom and don't speak fennish, but these are the quirks > of the language. > Though, IIRC, Lin Carter wrote an essay for =If= (anyone here from the '60s still remember that mag?) decades ago in which he asserted that fen indeed spoke fennish at one time. Ghod, that takes me back with a vengeance (-; Snarkhunter