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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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’
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