And while I'm here...

Can I just say that I don't care for the term 'feedback whore'? I have no idea where it came from or how it was coined... that's the thing with fandom. Things just happen and all of a sudden, there's this whole other language you've got to speak from the vague pronouns (ze? hir?) to phrases like 'fanon' or 'Jossed' or 'BNF' or whatever. Not all of this verbage is very pleasant or flattering to fandom. It makes me wonder if we respect what we do or what others do or are we just looking for the very next 'cool' way of expressing ourselves and when one cool phrase comes around, we all jump on the bandwagon to use it? "Quirk a grin anyone"? And out of respect to Jemima, I won't mention the verbization of "gentle."

I admit to being guilty of doing these things as well. I just never thought about until today why we choose the words we do, why we coin the phrases we do, and why oh why do we keep using some of these things when they are obviously not the most elegant way of describing or characterizing fandom? It seems a community of writers could create a language that is both fluid and creative, but at the same time respectful of what we do.

Fandom writing - and I'm talking about blogs and journals, not fanfic - is very different. Maybe it's because fandom writing is free from the constraints of editing and it's more personal, more raw. So the first words to spring to mind are the ones that hit the screen. But still, it doesn't always make sense and sometimes, what's said is downright confusing. I'm not advocating editing blogs, no - I'd be the first one who'd have to line up to do that - it's just curious to me how differently we express ourselves online, in the comfort and anonymity of whatever persona we've adopted, versus how we would in RL. And perhaps that's the beauty of blogging - we say what we want and how we want to without worrying about consequences.

But at the same time, you can see the line between fanfic cliques, one that is clearly defined by language. You have 'clean' blogs that you could read in front of your mother and then you have other blogs which practically need an NC-17 rating on a paragraph 3 lines long and they all link together - ie the 'clean' bloggers seem to hang together and the more risque ones are linked up. Which lends credence to theory that yes, language is absorbed from fandom and each fandom has its own, distinctive way of putting and saying things.

I honestly think there ought to be some kind of dictionary for fandom out there - some blogs are utterly incomprehensible to me and the stylistic writing tricks occasionally trick me up, along with the gushing words of praise - I'm not always sure what the reviews mean except that someone really, really, really liked the fic ("Love, love, love this fic and I will follow the author to the ends of the earth just to convince them to write one more word. I will bake them brownies because they so rock - it's like better than Cats, I laughed and cried so much."). When you read some recs these days, you get the feeling that the person doing the rec'ing has just whipped out every adjective in the dictionary to tell you how much they loved the fic and along the way, they invent new adjectives to convey exactly what they mean. Which makes me think that there is a whole hip and cool lexicon out there that just doesn't show up in Trek and you can have a varied fandom culture across the board (though I constantly see the same names in some fandoms - you can almost trace the migratory path of some writers).

But back to the issue of language.

I'm still confused why any author would profess herself to be another author's 'slave' or why someone would confess that they would be willing to lick so and so's feet. Yes, there has to be a limit in the vocabulary of devotion, methinks, because frankly, it gets scary and occasionally makes me glad that there are pixels between me and the rest of the world out there. Or maybe it's just envy because no one has ever offered to be my slave, lick my feet or start a fan club in my name (and if you do, please don't tell me about it).

But I'm also one of those uptight people when it comes to language because I really believe the words used say a lot about a person and what the person is like. For instance, I can't not terribly fond of that one word that starts with an 'f' and can be used interchangeably as a noun/verb/adjective, depending on the whim of the author; other people are almost obsessive about using the word and voila, it's every other sentence and as my beta would say when I fall into the redundancy trap, "Please buy yourself another word. Thank you." To me, that makes sense - we're writers and theoretically, we shouldn't have to depend so much on one word, yet we do. Or that could just be my hang-up. Others don't have such issues with language - I accept that I could be in the minority here and I'm willing to listen and be convinced of the literary value of such language.

Don't mind me. Slightly bitter, slightly cranky, very unemployed.