Trouble imagining what this accent/afected way of speaking sounds like? Just remember how the comic book store guy talks on the Simpsons, and that's the accent.

I stopped going to conventions around '93, when I started working my way to grad school. After maybe three years, I skipped out of the grind at CMU for a weekend and drove to Philcon to meet friends.

It was a very strange experience. I felt like Oliver Sacks visiting a colony of, ahmm, Neurologically Different folks.

Edited by author 11-19-2001 12:16 AM
Pat -- the change in vocabulary you describe can be linked to the way that peoples' personalities change from setting to setting. I recommend "The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life", written in 1959 by Erving Goffman (http://www.cfmc.com/adamb/writings/goffman.htm), which also links into possible reasons as to *why* fen speak differently.

Coming from the role-playing game community, I'm aware that there's yet another vocabulary and set of gestures and behaviours in use there, similar but by no means identical to the SF fans'. There's several theses waiting to be written here, I'm sure.

I wonder if they've studied the change in accent of people from one mileau to another. I know I speak quite differently at work than I do in private life. F'instance, I swear when I'm not at work, and I deliberately ratchet down my vocabulary when I'm at work.

One of the interesting conclusions of the research is that elements of the fannish accent are derived from habitual setting and use of the jaw and mouth, things that are believed to be set in childhood and thereafter immutable (without speech therapy) -- this seems to indicate that fans actually come together because they recognize each other's accents, not the other way round.

I suspect chico is right. There may be a whiff of psychological disorder in it as well. (Rather, what in its more extreme forms would be called a disorder)

Valley girls, vato gangs, Palm Beach socialites - hang with any group long enough and you'll probably start mimicking the speech patterns. It's some sort of linguistics inbreeding perpetuated by a need to belong. I think it was Tom Brokaw, who after only three days in London for Princess Di's funeral, said on the air: We "shan't" see her like again. Back in Iowa, he probably would've just said "won't". Anyway, an amusing article. BTW tounge is spelled tongue.

The way the story was recounted to me, the therapist *did* find significant differences between fans and other smartypants types.

I'd like to see a comparison of fannish behavior and the bahavior of a general population of intellectually active people. I doubt their'd be much difference.