I’ve seen the term “stan” being thrown out a lot on the internet recently, and as far as I know there’s people who constantly refer to themselves as one of them, if I remember correctly that was an early 2000’s song about some *crazed* fan (with a negative connotation) Why?
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Stan by Eminem was a (fictional) song about a super crazy fan who kept writing letters to Eminem, Eminem wasn’t replying because busy.
The fan ended up killing himself because he didn’t get attention from his idol
Somehow, this has become a cool, hot term to describe oneself when they are a big fan of something. “To be emulating Stan” I guess
The song is Stan by Eminem and yes it’s about an obsessive fan called Stan.
I imagine after that song came out some people started joking that they love X band/artist so much that “I’m a Stan!” and it stuck.
‘Verbing’ is a phenomenon in English where nouns are used as verbs. English particularly lends itself to this linguistically – you can use any noun as a verb and you’ll probably be understood even if it isn’t correct. For example, “she turtled across the road.”
It’s particularly prevalent in internet culture, so I imagine that’s how the idea of ‘a Stan’ became a verb, ‘to stan’ – ie to be obsessively into something.
A similar phenomenon is ‘to ship’ – to desire two characters in a fandom to get together. Which came from ‘relationship’ -> ‘ship’ -> then was verbed to ‘to ship’
Why what? If why is the term standard being used more often is your question I think it’s because we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of things like the dream and bts Stan communities.
Also yeah that’s a good song by Elton John and Eminem (if I’m thinking if the same one) but they didn’t invent the term
It was by Eminem used to describe a crazed fan who would go to any extent to show they love their idol it got twisted by mostly the dream smp fandom to mean a really loyal fan but that isn’t the real meaning
Rule 2.
Better to check r/outoftheloop or r/answers.
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