my fandom journey: timeline

2000: Introduced to NSYNC het on Geocities/Angelfire, wrote some.

I stumbled upon nsync slash in 2001 and read as much as I could as fast as possible. When I started telling my mom, a science fiction convention regular since the 1970s, about the existence of it, she said, "Oh, you mean like people used to write about Kirk and Spock?"

"What?" I said.

She told me about Kirk/Spock zine fandom. I was like, 'I've never watched the original Star Trek before, but I have to check this out!'

2001: Reading: Popslash & Star Trek (all varieties). Writing: Star Trek and popslash.
( I looked at my bookmarks, my Pinboard, and my journal archive to make this 17-year timeline, and that was definitely a great use of my time. )

today it's the floppy flippy, tomorrow it's the flippy floppy, and this sounds like a kids' song

When, as an individual person, you say stuff a certain weird way that nobody else does, that's called an "idiolect", right?

So what's it called when a family unit has some slang or jargon or whatever... terms that are unique to them?

When I was a kid my dad's eccentric fannish poet friend Geoff Huth wrote up a whole book of them from his family that he shared with their connections, and we were pretty impressed, having a fair number in our own (that is, my childhood nuclear family's) circle, but not nearly as many.

IMO my dad's best coinage is "pice", an endearment/form of address that he and my mom would both use to address each other, as "the singular of spouse". (I think it started as 'spice' and evolved into 'pice'?)

Since my wife tragically works a service job with randomly variable hours that are never predictable until she gets her schedule a couple of weeks in advance, she eventually coined the term "the flip-flop" (which then evolved into "the flippy floppy") for an evening when she's worked a late shift and has very little time before going to bed because she has to work an early morning shift the next day (the minimum difference is 9 pm-7 am).

Eventually, we realized that we needed a term for the inverse of this, a work night with extra free time because she's already worked an early shift and has a late shift the next day: "the floppy flippy".

The fact that these terms sound extremely undignified is either a bonus or a detriment, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

#language #idiolect #dad jokes #service industry