To Ship or Not To Ship — Fansplaining
So Flourish kind of got into a minor internet fight with the Merriam-Webster dictionary and then she and @allthingslinguistic went on a crusade along with a bunch of fans and word nerds to figure out the first recorded use of “ship” as a verb and then we decided it had to be an explainer. So if you need to explain “ship” and “slash” to people then, you know, you’ve got it right here!
(This is the first explainer since we hit our Patreon goal that allows us to guarantee a fresh piping hot explainer every month! Hooray!)Flourish argues with a dictionary and the results are EXCELLENT.
We researched the fuck out of it. The early letterzines/newsletters summaries on Fanlore were very helpful to understanding how the words were being used during analog fandom (the A.F. era)