Stealth Geekery and FanSpeak

[alanajoli]

shanna_s has talked a number of times about the art of being a Stealth Geek: someone who appears to be a "normal" person to other non-geeks, but in actuality can speak geek just as fluently as he or she can speak pop-culture or sports or a host of other topics. I've always enjoyed this concept, though I suspect I'm a bit less stealthy than true Stealth Geeks.

Recently, however, willshetterly posted a link on FanSpeak as actual body-language dialect. I'm not sure how to think about this, as I suspect my linguistic usage tends to fall somewhere in between FanSpeak and Midwestern. (I catch myself using the past participle of buy not as bought but as boughten, which rhymes with gotten, which I either picked up in Iowa or Michigan. Also, I use cattycorner for... huh... I'm not even sure what the non-Midwestern word for that is. Just across, I suspect.)

So my new ponderance is this: is the difference between classic geeks and stealth geeks the use of FanSpeak (or lack thereof)? Of can stealth geeks just switch between the two? I'll have to ask shanna_s and see what she thinks...

Edit: According to lj's spell-check, ponderance is not an actual word. I think it should be, so I'm leaving it as is, which may somehow relate to the query I'm making.

Comments

[slwhitman.livejournal.com]

Cattycorner is very midwestern. I've gotten made fun of using it on two coasts and in the intermountain West. Apparently the "correct" term, according to those friends, is "kittycorner." Um, same thing?

My grandma always apologizes that her cookies are "store-boughten" instead of homemade, which is how she prefers to be hospitable.

I'm very much a Stealth Geek, to the point that most of my geeky friends deny that I'm any sort of a geek. Okay, whatever. Hey, I admit, I was a cheerleader in high school. (But I was also on the yearbook committee and captain of the scholastic bowl team.)

However, I very much do the talking-over-another-person if they're not listening to me. I don't think that's FanSpeak, I think that's my upbringing--my mom's side of the family is very much the same way.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I'm so delighted that "boughten" isn't only me (and, in fact, I'd completely forgot how often I used to hear store-boughten--I'm sure that's where I get it).

The other word I could come up with for cattycorner was cattywhompus, which was used in my home town. Whew!

I would have thought you to be too much a book nerd to be a true stealth geek... but then, we've always talked about books! And I know you play rpgs and ccgs now, and know what all the important acronyms mean. So stealthy you may be, but I give you total geek cred, cheerleader or not.

I'd like to see a discussion of whether fanspeak can be further distinguished in regionality. I completely buy the "pronouncing words like they're written" bit, because most of my academic geek friends do that (we were all huge readers in our childhoods and got our big vocabularies from books rather than conversation). But again I'm wondering how much the actual communication applies to fandom, and how much comes from the regions with the largest fan populations. (People in New England use much different body language than people did where I grew up, and have a different idea of what being "friendly"--as opposed to being "nosy"--means. I suspect regional culture is behind a lot of the FanSpeak discussion.)