Dragaera

Fandom

Fri Jun 30 09:59:26 PDT 2006

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