Don't Spit in the Alphabet Soup

Meta
Title:	Don't Spit in the Alphabet Soup
Creator:	Merlin Missy
Date(s):	June 26, 2008
Medium:
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:
External Links:	Don't Spit in the Alphabet Soup
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Don't Spit in the Alphabet Soup is a 2008 essay by Merlin Missy.

It is "A brief guide to acronyms in your everyday fannish life."

Series

This essay is part of a series called Dr. Merlin's Soapbox.

Some Topics Discussed

• short descriptions of OTP, OT3, BNF, MOF, 'Zine, SMOF, GOH TL;DR, , Slash, Femslash/Femmeslash, Yaoi, Yuri, FW, LJ, JF, IJ, GJ, TPTB, FF.net, AFF.net, J/K

• not fannish, but internet-speak (this essay doesn't make the distinction): OMG, ZOMG, WTF, OMGWTFBBQ ("Exclamation of extreme confusion."), OMGWTFPOLARBEAR ("The writer has just watched Lost."), TPB, TTFN, TTYL

From the Essay

So perhaps you, young fanthing, have strayed into fandom recently. First, you were agog at what you found: People! Like you! Who make up stories in their heads about the people on the same shows you do! And sometimes set them to music! And talk about them all day long. You have arrived, and it is like the messy, exuberant homecomings you always suspected were just a titch overrated in all the high school movies, but now it's you, surrounded by the coolest people on the planet and they LIKE YOU. Fandom rocks.

And then you discover less cool things, but even before your very first flamewar, you're going to come across acronyms you may not understand...

There are also a plethora of acronyms for various television series, and book and movie series. Some overlap. (It was a very good day when Supernatural fandom settled on SPN, because the Sports Night confusion was giving me headaches.) Certain pairings in certain fandoms get acronyms, portmanteaus, or oddball names like "The Government Stole My Toad." When in doubt, ask.

J/K: Just kidding. Sometimes people will say "J/K" out loud in normal conversation. This means they are giving you permission to smack them upside the head. (Probably. This is one of those social situations you should ask about when it comes up.)

FF.net: Fanfiction.net. Also "The Pit of Voles". The largest fanfiction archive in the world. Started by Xing Li as a senior design project. Open to absolutely everyone, and thus, filled with much bad fiction as well as good. Lost many BNFs when the archive stopped allowing mature-rated material to be hosted on the site.

TPTB: The Powers That Be. The people in charge of whatever you like. Sometimes they wear suits and neckties , and sometimes they're exactly like us except they get paid to tell these stories. Also, a reference to the possibly good but mostly absent beings overseeing the Buffyverse.

LJ: Livejournal. Much of fandom congregates on this blogging service, due to the ease of communication involved. Much of fandom has also migrated away in various waves as TPTB at LJ have screwed their users over at various times. Has Open Source software and has spawned several clone sites.

FW: Fandom Wank. Community of fans currently meeting at Journalfen, whose purpose in life is to point and laugh when fans act stupid or self-important. If you are reported on FW too many times, or in too spectacular a fashion, you will become a well-known fan and not in the good way.

TL;DR: Too Long; Didn't Read. Posted as a reply to anything long that the replier wants to be seen as too cool to have read. Often used as a slang term for "boring".

GOH: Guest of Honor. When you're at a convention, this is probably the person you shelled out the cash to see.

SMOF: Secret Master/Mistress of Fandom. Just like a MOF, but nobody knows your name. There are many people who work just barely behind the scenes getting things written and coded and run, without whom your personal pocket of fandom would collapse, but they don't get the glory.

BNF: Big Name Fan. If there's someone in your fandom that people in other fandoms have heard of, for good or ill, that's a BNF. If there's a fan in your fandom that every single person in your fandom knows, same kind of thing. Some BNFs attract cults of personality around them and use their influence to make things happen in and around the fandom. Some are well-known because they're the ones who wrote the stories and built the websites and organized the conventions and moderated the mailing lists. BNF is a morally-neutral state, despite the connotations; it's what the individual fan does that matters.