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

[dmoonfire.livejournal.com]

I think there is definately an overlap with accents in this one. One of my coworkers can actually tell which part of Chicago someone grew up in based on how they pronounce certain words, roof and folk are actually two of them. Its one of those quirky things, so you can pronounce words differently based on locality.

However, I have also had my psych friend (working on her Ph.D. apparently) mention about the layers of conversation. In our games, it is not uncommon for people to be asking rules, in-character, out-of-characters all at the same time and everyone knows what is what and which.

fightertype has tried for the last few years to get us to stop interrupting people, but that doesn't work (and she interrupts us in the same way). It gets kind of frustrating when people don't listen, but we do that one heavily also. :)